China
Africa
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Why Study the History of Digital Media and How?
Published in Gabriele Balbi, Paolo Magaudda, A History of Digital Media, 2018
Gabriele Balbi, Paolo Magaudda
This book’s approach to digital media history is a generally neglected one. The history of digital media has received limited attention because new media are an apparently recent phenomenon—even if this term has been used since the 1960s and 1970s in reference to satellites, video cameras and other, at the time, new communication technologies. New media seem to change so quickly and are considered so radically “revolutionary” (thus provoking a drastic break with the past) that historical analysis has often been difficult to apply and, ultimately, useless for a vision concentrated on the present and future (not by chance named “presentism”).
Disputing security and risk
Published in Ian Scoones, Andy Stirling, The Politics of Uncertainty, 2020
Helena Farrand Carrapico, Narzanin Massoumi, William McGowan, Gabe Mythen
In drawing the chapter to a close, it has been our intention to deploy concrete examples of the ways in which problems of uncertainty have an impact upon ‘security’ in its many guises, from policy and practice to the ontological and emotional. Having discussed several problematiques that arise when we seek to engage in debates about uncertainty in the context of security, we wish to end by offering up four caveats that serve as simultaneous provocations. First, it is our contention that, rather than analysing uncertainty as a purely abstract concept, we need to situate it in specific contexts of knowledge and grounded cultural milieu. The dangers of presentism – through which histories of uncertainty might become masked – are obvious in this regard. Second, having identified a set of specific practices to focus on, it is important to remain alert to the different characteristics of uncertainty, and to speak consistently about particular strands across a chosen set of observations. Third, as we have demonstrated, it is important to be aware of – and alert to – the pursuit of narrow, sectoral interests that may lurk beneath the veil that uncertainty enables. Fourth, and relatedly, we would counsel against ‘uncertainty imperialism’, whereby the term becomes used as a catch-all lingua franca that is devoid of specificity. Mirroring academic overuse of ‘risk’ as an heuristic device, if we are loose in bandying about the discourse of ‘uncertainty’ there is a palpable danger of catachresis. While theoretically exploring the constitution of uncertainty adds to the corpus of academic knowledge, as we have intimated, overstretching its explanatory potential may serve to shroud rather than elucidate more pressing and critical analyses of power relations, inequalities and injustices.
Constructing condensed memories in functorial time
Published in Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2023
Here, we employ methods developed by Scholze (2017) and Clausen and Scholze (2021) to re-express the previous sheaf-theoretic ‘picture’ of episodic memory in terms of a ‘condensed’ object located at a single notional ‘point’ that we interpret informally as ‘the present’ without committing ourselves to any particular position in the presentism – eternalism debate (e.g. Noonan, 2013; Rovelli, 2019b). This condensed object can, in turn, be considered a representable functor, and so effectively a family of operators invokable at the present. These operators construct extended, multi-event representations of the (retrospective) past or the (prospective) future. This operator-based ‘picture’ of episodic memory is purely constructive: recalling a past event or planning a future event consists in executing one or more such families of operators. Hence, while the formal construction that follows is somewhat complicated, its interpretation is simple and, from a biological or cognitive-science point of view, fairly obvious.