Suchergebnisse

Contemporary technology and media era is characterized by aesthetics
domination over logic, ethics and metaphysics. The reality is replaced by
simulation and the picture is more important that the truth. The narcissistic
media shape not only one's perception, but one's experience of the world,
creation of taste and system of values. Therefore, we need a new media
aesthetics that would lead to the development of critical media sensitivity
and comprehension of how media messages emerge and affect the audience. If
there is no critical aesthetics, there exists anesthesia. Being both a media
perception theory and media taste critique, media aesthetics can contribute
to creating a new media culture, realizing human potentials and improving
communication rationality. Aesthetics is a prerequisite of media literacy and
critical media pedagogy. In such a world media can serve as creative
extensions of human perception, tools for comprehension and socialization in
such a way as suggested by poet William Blake: If the doors of perception
were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

This article examines mobile phone videos that have been disseminated via YouTube since the beginning of the Syrian civil war to illustrate how media aesthetics and public discourse interact in the perception and interpretation of conflicts as crises. The Syrian civil war has shown that scenes of immediate protest and military action recorded on mobile phones become instruments of war and conflict as they bear a new aesthetics that influences the perception and interpretation of the situation in Syria. The article introduces a research perspective that is informed by discourse analysis and media aesthetics and can be used for the study of the perception and interpretation of war and conflict in relation to social media in general and mobile phone videos in particular. By providing new insights from this perspective for the study of war and conflict reporting, it furthers the debate on the perceptive and interpretive impact of images.

This paper explores the plurality and dynamics of 'cultural heritage' formation in Ghana by looking at key players in the historically constituted heritage arena and the contestations between them. Focusing on the intersecting domains of the state, religion, and entertainment media, it discerns several tendencies with regard to the framing of cultural pasts: mobilization of 'heritage' by the state as part of national identity politics; contestation of this state project by Pentecostal churches that view 'heritage' as demonic and dangerous; and revaluation of 'heritage' as aesthetic style in local television and video making. Recent, market-driven trends towards a more positive representation of 'African heritage' depart from earlier state initiatives in their explicit focus on visual style and design, raising new questions about the links between heritage and visual aesthetics and asking for an understanding of cultural heritage that takes into account issues of style, design, and commerce. Adapted from the source document.

Postproverbials are postmodern proverbs that deconstruct the structural and semantic aspects of the traditional proverbs. They are proverbs coined either from the existing proverbs as anti-proverbs or from those that are created newly as new proverbs. The focus of this paper is to examine the tenets of the postproverbials and postmodernism found in the new media proverbs of Ify Asia Chiemeziem's. About twenty-three proverbs are carefully selected from Chiemeziem's Facebook wall grouped, and critically analysed according to their contents. References are made to some Yoruba, Nupe and Hausa postproverbials subject to further research. It is observed that most of the proverbs are decorated with sexual imageries, which deconstruct the hitherto held sacrilegious nature of human sex organs featuring in African proverbs. The proverbs are created for their humouristic purposes and as a tool for creating traffics on Chiemeziem's Facebook wall. The selected new proverbs have proved that postproverbials give room for innovation and creativity, which engenders the formation of new proverbs. Postproverbials are not ethnic-based, rather, a postmodern phenomenon culturing across cultures and traditions. The paper, thus, concludes that the emerging facts about postproverbials are indications that the theory is viable and will endure the test of time.

Abstract
This research investigates how the practices of sharing pictures with specific audiences on social media may be related to aesthetics and affordances. Based on fieldwork (interviews, picture analysis and digital ethnography) with a group of female teenagers in Vienna, Austria, how they visually curate their accounts is mapped and reconstructed. Regarding content and aesthetics, different kinds of pictures are shared using different apps. Snapchat, for example, (for this specific group at the time of the investigation) is the preferred medium for live communication with very close friends using fast, pixelated, "ugly" pictures, while Instagram serves to share polished, conventional, "beautiful" pictures with broader audiences. Based on this case study, three conceptual arguments can be made. First, visual communication is practised in relation to specific social settings or audiences. Social media is part of these practices, and users navigate differences between platforms to manage identities and relationships. Second, the analysis of practices embedded in specific software, therefore, has to be contextualised and related to the structures of these environments. Software co-constructs processes of editing, distribution, sharing and affirmation, and its affordances have to be related to the ways in which users exploit them. Third, as visual communication becomes an intrinsic part of online communication, the exploration of how distinctions between audiences and affordances play out stylistically appears to be of particular interest, which entails calibrated aesthetics; however, this visual layer is seldom investigated closely.