Publications

The second edition of this handbook offers a thoroughly updated overview of the different approaches and perspectives in communication ethics today.Extending the path paved by its predecessor, this handbook includes new issues and concerns that have emerged in the interim—from environmentalism to artificial intelligence, from disability studies to fake news. It also features a new structure, comprised of three sections representing a wide array of communication ethics: traditions, contexts, and debates. Rather than focusing exclusively on a subset of ethics (such as interpersonal communication, rhetoric, or journalism, as do other handbooks of ethics in communication), this collection provides a valuable resource for those who seek a broader basis on which to study communication ethics.This handbook is a must-read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in all areas of communication studies, as well as in neighboring disciplines such as rhetoric, media studies, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.

In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amit Pinchevski proposes that echo is not simple repetition and the reproduction of sameness but an agent of change and a source of creation and creativity. Pinchevski views echo as a medium, connecting and mediating across and between disparate domains. He reminds us that the mythological Echo, sentenced by Juno to repeat the last words of others, found a way to make repetition expressive. So too does echo introduce variation into sameness, mediating between self and other, inside and outside, known and unknown, near and far. Echo has the potential to bring back something unexpected, either more or less than what was sent. Pinchevski distinguishes echo from the closely related but sometimes conflated reflection, reverberation, and resonance; considers echolalia as an active, reactive, and creative vocalic force, the launching pad of speech; and explores echo as a rhetorical device, steering between appropriation and response while always maintaining relation. He examines the trope of echo chamber and both destructive and constructive echoing; describes various echo techniques and how echo can serve practical purposes from echolocation in bats and submarines to architecture and sound recording; explores echo as a link to the past, both literally and metaphorically; and considers echo as medium using Marshall McLuhan's tetrad.

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible. Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be. While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.

This chapter seeks inspiration for media ethics in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the Other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas’s own philosophy. Levinas’s writing serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. This chapter extends the logic of the ethical message beyond the two key media in Levinas’s work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether interruption can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout the chapter is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face-to face, where Levinas’s thought is typically situated, to the context of thirdness and justice.

Genizah is the Jewish practice of preserving discarded holy texts and artifacts. This is following the biblical decree prohibiting the erasure or the blotting out of the name of God, which is believed to contain divine presence within matter. The verb ganzakh derives from ancient Farsi, where it denotes to hide, secrete and preserve. Later, genizah started to function in Hebrew as a noun which specifies a place: ›the treasury.‹ This root also appeared in late biblical texts, such as The Book of Esther, The Book of Daniel, and The Book of Ezra, all with clear Persian influences. In Talmudic literature genizah designated a set of ritualized techniques for storing and removing written material containing the name of God but such that are determined to be defective or unusable. According to halakhic laws, which are the Jewish religious laws, these written materials were not to be destroyed or simply disposed of but treated with reverence fitting holy presence, typically by way of burial. This archaic practice encountered new challenges with the emergence of modern media, which not only introduced new technical means of storage and dissemination but also transformed the very logic of inscription. It is in this respect that genizah constitutes a prime example for Günter Thomas’s designation of religion as a ›machinery‹ of mediation, and its modern media phases as the mediatization of religion.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) was one of the most prominent ethicists of the twentieth century. Born in Lithuania to a Jewish orthodox family, Levinas took an interest in the Hebrew Bible from early age, but also grew up reading the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He witnessed the rise of the Russian Revolution after his family fled to the Ukraine during the First World War. At the age of 18, he began studying philosophy at the University of Strasburg, later spending two semesters at Freiburg University. Two German philosophers were to be a constant source of inspiration—and disagreement—throughout his intellectual life: Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. While following their lead in the phenomenological tradition, his thinking sought to problematize the foundations of their respective works. With the break of the Second World War, Levinas was drafted to the French Army. He was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp until the end of the war. During that time, his wife and daughter were in hiding in a monastery with the help of Levinas’s classmate at Strasburg, Maurice Blanchot. Upon release, Levinas discovered that most of his family had been killed during the war, including his parents, two brothers and in-laws. The Holocaust and its aftermath came to inform his conception of ethics, hanging over as a dark reminder of man-made atrocities.

The testimonies of hospitalized survivors may well be described as the counter model of the publically accepted and documented testimonial genre. They are the counter-testimony of the popular Holocaust testimony. As such, they are bound to be rejected, as they unsettle the prevailing sense of what Holocaust testimony should look like. Questions about believability as raised in Rakovsky's testimony are one example of such resistance. Countertransference might take the more general form of public avoidance or dismissal, as was the case until recently. Yet the distinctive considerations of countertransference associated with counter-testimony have implications not only for this relatively small collection but to testimony in general. Counter-testimony puts the widely established variety of testimony in a new light. It is as though Laub brings his recent project to bear on his earlier one, as a commentary on the existing testimony and trauma discourse to which he himself had been a key contributor.

Although entering only recently into communication scholarship, the problem of alterity is intrinsic to communication theory and philosophy. Alterity presents the challenge of resistance to communication and of the limit of communication. As such, it invites rethinking communication not simply as a question of knowledge and understanding but as a question of ethics and politics.

If there is one thing that brings together the three themes of this collection – ethics, image, and technology – it is the face. As all the contributions to this volume masterfully demonstrate, the ultimate benefit in thinking across disciplines and paradigms is the opportunity to rethink concepts, especially those that appear to be self-evident or are taken for granted. Face is something that we all have yet is still unique to each and every one. It is the organ by which we best present and express ourselves and at the same time that which immediately betrays our origin, age, and mood. We are quick to extend our face to the world but as quick in wishing to hide or protect it from the world. We face each other regularly, but in facing we enact a singularly human combination of biology, culture, and morality. The face is our most basic medium of sociality. Like every medium, it is what stands in the middle, it both connects and separates – connects by virtue of separating – producing commonality while maintaining its in-betweenness. It is possible to identify three functions of the face as a medium: it is the surface by which we appear; the interface through which we interact; and the face-to-face in which we care for others. Regarding the face as a medium is meant here as a heuristic tool, with the aim of offering some reflections on the way technical media configure the social life of the face. “God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another,” says Hamlet to Ophelia, a statement that might acquire new meanings in our age of Facebook, selfies, and facial-recognition technologies.

This article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work: speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas's ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas's own philosophy. Levinas's text serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. The article then extends the logic of the ethical message beyond the two key media present in Levinas's work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether the inter- ruption it effects can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face to face, where Levinas's thought is typically situated, to the context of the third and of justice. Levinas's thought may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media—radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics.

In a dialogue that concerns moderation and self-knowledge, Plato sug-gests that there could be a way of seeing that does not observe the objectbut focuses on our ways of seeing it. More accurately, Plato seems to sug-gest‘avisionofvisionitself’,awayoffacingthatmakeswhatisseenintoa mirror that returns the vision to itself. At the centre of the followingdiscussion is the duality of facing the image: an image that we face andan image that faces back at us. We usually look at images for what theyare, and examine what they represent or how they affect us. But we canalso make the image look back by describing its capacity to awaken inus a way of seeing that is more reflexive, that places us as the agents of sight and hence as implicated by what we see.

Emmanuel Levinas was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, yet has only been recently acknowledged as such. He proposed a radically different way to approach ethical questions—in fact, to approach the question of ethics itself. An heir to the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, his thought came to problematize the foundations upon which lies the work of his teachers. While his presence among French academic circles remained relatively marginal for most of his career, his work nevertheless informed some of the key debates in continental philosophy of the latter half of the century, and had a decisive impact on a generation of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, Enrique Dussel, and Luce Irigaray. For the better part of his life, Levinas studied and taught the Talmud, whose wisdom he attempted to introduce to various philosophical and contemporary questions. Indeed, one way to describe his philosophy is as a consistent effort to implicate “Greek” with “Hebrew,” that is, to translate the ethical message of Judaism into the Western philosophical discourse. Looming over Levinas was the dark shadow of the Holocaust, which claimed most of his family and in many respects dominated the development of his work.

Discussions on memory nowadays seem to proceed in two general directions. On the one hand, there is a growing interest in mediated memory: the various forms by which memory is formed and shared by means of media technologies, especially new media and multimedia. On the other hand, there is a consistent preoccupation with traumatic memory, that is, with the ways past episodes, which have been blocked out of private or public consciousness, return to haunt the present in various displaced manifestations. I want to argue that these two seemingly divergent types of memory (and ways to account for memory) are in fact interlinked, both historically and conceptually. What links them together is the technological apparatus of the archive, which has seen significant technological transformations during the last three decades. These transformations have given rise to new archival formations that in turn feed into the social practice of memory. At issue, then, is a triangulated relationship between archive, media, and trauma, the general outline of which is explicated below. While it is still too early to gain a comprehensive understanding of the developments underway, some emerging trends are nevertheless perceptible. Viewing the archive as a medium of memory may thus offer valuable insights into the contemporary challenges of contending with the past.

Witnessing has recently become a contested issue in media scholarship, constituting a complex practice midway between experience and agency. Occupying a distinctive place in contemporary media studies, witnessing combines the evolution of media technologies — production, transmission, and representation — with weighty questions of morality and audience responsibility. Arguably, the very definition of what it means to be a witness in this day and age has changed with the expansion of media technologies. This chapter is an attempt to rethink the stakes and implications involved in media witnessing. It is beneficial to open by outlining the main points to be developed in the following discussion. (1) Witnessing, we suggest, is subject to a constant struggle and is hence an inherently political practice. (2) We regard the act of witnessing as contingent upon the specific event witnessed; thus, the ontology of witnessing is dependent on its context, as different events give rise to different modalities of witnessing. (3) As a political practice relative to a specific event, witnessing transpires in what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) designates as a field. Thus, witnessing is regarded as a field comprised of various agents, interests, positions, and resources. (4) The field of witnessing operates on terms of trust, which is the basic currency among the agents and the object for which they compete. The final section of the chapter will be devoted to a case study, an analysis of the field of witnessing in two documentary films produced shortly after the clashes in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in March 2002.

This paper seeks to rethink communication ethics beyond dialogue by advancing the notion of thirdness as its basis. Taking Ronald C. Arnett’s idea of dialogic civility as a starting point, the discussion proceeds to reveal the inseparability and interconnectedness of the interpersonal and the impersonal, the particular and the universal. It then considers Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as triadic rather than dialogic, as exposed to the call of the immediate Other while always haunted by the calls of the third party, of other Others. From this, a new understating of mediation arises—ethical mediation—one that does not culminate in transcending its elements but in attending, each time again, to their difference.

In recent decades, efforts have been made to gather and digitize the testimonies of living Holocaust survivors. The challenge we now face is attending to those thousands of human stories, which while safely stored in archives, may nevertheless disappear into oblivion. Despite recent advances in narrative analysis in the fields of Computational Literature (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), existing language model technology still faces challenges in analyzing elaborate narratives and long texts. One such challenge is text segmentation – a long-standing issue in the area of CL and NLP.  In our work, we propose a computational method to approach this problem. Our research draws on testimony transcripts from the Shoah Foundation (SF) Holocaust  archive for supervised topic classification, which is then used as topics guidance for automatic segmentation.

In the past few decades, self-help books on communication have ranked among the top titles on bestseller lists. Offering advice about improving communication skills in a variety of contexts, they both reflect and promote a widespread discourse about the importance of good communication in everyday life, in what is in fact a paradoxical endeavor – solving flawed communication with more communication. Based on an analysis of 18 bestselling self-help books, the paper examines the meaning of three recurring themes – “listening,” “awareness” and “practice” – and analyzes the paradoxical relationship between what the books say about communication and how they say it. The findings serve to illuminate the relationship between communication and metacommunication more broadly, which, in turn, helps to explain the conditions by which authors express their ideas – their selection of textuality, despite, and precisely because of, its difference from oral talk.

In the past few decades, the notion of “communication skills” has become increasingly dominant in cultural discourse, as such skills are deemed crucial for success in seemingly various professional occupations and in diverse aspects of an individual’s life. This study traces the development of the notion of communication as skills that emerged from the theoretical and experimental work of the Palo Alto group in the 1950s and 1960s. It analyzes the shift from the cybernetic, system-oriented, and technology-inspired conceptualization of communication by the group to the current widespread perception of communication as a self-centered, emotions-directed, reflexive and conscious set of skills. The study argues that, more than a misrepresentation of the group’s ideas, this shift reflects a tension already embedded in the work of the Palo Alto group between theorizing and practicing communication.

This article explores the relationship between psychotherapy and sound reproduction technologies from the early 20th century to the present. Subscribing to a media genealogy approach, it traces the changing status of the recorded voice in therapy as set against broader transformations in the field of mental health. Delving into the recorded voice’s diverse applications across psychotherapeutic approaches, it demonstrates how technology worked to unravel the temporal and spatial formations of the therapeutic setting, thereby unsettling established hierarchies, terminologies, and techniques while at the same time supporting the integrity of the therapeutic situation. The article points to sound media’s capacity to bifurcate the voice into somatic and expressive elements and reassemble them in various configurations, thereby producing the ‘psyche’ through alternative access points. The story of the recorded voice in therapy provides a glimpse into the way technological affordances inform therapeutic concepts and practices, which in turn implement technology in study, training, and treatment.

What are media? What do they do? Are these two questions the same? And is the process we have in mind in asking them that of mediation or of mediality? In debating the issue, we came to realize that we are also dealing here with a translation problem. When a German and an Israeli speak in English about media, mediation, and mediality, it is only natural, given the different cultural and academic contexts, that there will be differences in understanding. Whereas in German the difference between mediation as Vermittlung and mediality as Medialität is quite clear, this hardly is the case in English. The Anglo media discourse often uses mediation and mediality interchangeably, and largely as related to the Aristotelian metaxy, a third that is in-between or in medio: [a]–[M]–[b]. But in German this refers to Vermittlung: the mediator (der Vermittler) by virtue of being in the middle mediates (vermittelt) something to be mediated (das Vermittelte). Importantly, the task of the mediator is tantamount to its ability to dissolve in the process, to bring things together while receding to the background.1 In this sense, media designate the conditions for mediation so as to put the relata in relation in the first place. Conversely, Medialität refers to the specific structure of a specific medium, i.e., its aesthetic obstinacies, technical operations, or semiotic significations. Thus, in English, discussion on Medialität actually takes place under “mediation,” which in German is normally translated as Vermittlung. However, at stake is more than conceptual inconsistencies. The translingual comparison suggests something essential to the understating of media.

This paper takes recent PTSD claims by content moderators working for Microsoft and Google as a starting point to discuss the changing nature of trauma in the context of social media and algorithmic culture. Placing these claims in the longer history of how media came to be regarded by clinicians as potentially traumatic, it considers content moderation as a form of immaterial labor, which brings the possibility to be traumatized into the cycle of digital labor. Therefore, to the extent that content moderators’ trauma exists as a clinical condition, it cannot be taken as an incidental side-effect but as a built-in potentiality. It is about the commodification of traumatic vulnerability itself. The discussion then proceeds to speculate about the possibility of using algorithms to identify potentially traumatic content and what would that mean for the understanding of trauma, especially as a mediated experience.

Associations between trauma and media theory are longstanding, going back at least to Walter Benjamin’s observations on technology and modernity, which were themselves informed by Freud’s 1920 speculations on war trauma following WWI. A century later, and in the wake of numerous conflicts, catastrophes, and far-reaching technological transformations—and of course the COVID pandemic—it is time to reconsider the relation between trauma and media, digital platforms in particular. While some significant scholarship has noted the intersections of modern media technologies such as photography, film, radio, television, and recently digital and algorithmic media, with the conception and experience of trauma, a more systematic theoretical consideration of the relation between media and trauma remains to be developed. And with the intensifying reliance on new and old media in these pandemic times the question of these relations is increasingly urgent. Moving beyond conceptions of media as representing or inducing trauma, this special section of Crosscurrents explores how (digital) media and trauma shape one another.

Setting dialogue in opposition to dissemination is one of the main themes of Speaking into the Air. This however does not entail regarding them as dichotomous or mutually exclusive. This article proposes that dialogue and dissemination are in fact interconnected, forming what I call “mutually assured heteronomy”: each finds its justification and limitation in the other. Neither autonomous nor combining to create a greater whole, dialogue and dissemination are caught in an interruptive bond. This reading allows reconsidering the ways ethics and politics are conceptualized in Speaking, revealing them as similarly linked in a non-dialectical, mutually implicating bond.

Recent years saw the rise of communication experts, operating in various contexts and enjoying high levels of popularity. The paper examines this expertise asking: What kind of expertise do communication experts hold? What is the communication they are expert in? And what can scholars of communication learn from experts who practice it professionally? Based on in-depth interviews with communication experts, we analyze what they believe are the components of their expertise and the reliance of this expertise on communication to communicate itself. We examine this recursive nature of expertise in communication by highlighting the relationship between these experts and laypeople, offering an explanation for the popularity of the former specifically in the era of “the death of expertise”.

This article applies a media geneaology perspective to examine the operative logic of Google Translate. Tracing machine translation from post–World War II (WWII) rule-based methods to contemporary algorithmic statistical methods, we analyze the underlying power structure of algorithmic and human collaboration that Translate encompasses. Focusing on the relationship between technology, language, and speakers, we argue that the operative logic of Translate represents a new model of translation, which we call uniform multilingualism. In this model, the manifest lingual plurality on the user side is mediated by lingual uniformity on the system side in the form of an English language algorithm, which has recently given way to an artificial neural network interlingual algorithm. We conclude by considering the significance of this recent shift in Translate’s algorithm.

Media Events is a key text in explicating the relation between media and event insofar as it provides an account of time experienced through the structures and practices of broadcasting. We suggest that Dayan and Katz’s book investigates the heyday of a particular version of historicity, which is now giving way to a networked configuration of media events. Media witnessing introduces a bottom-up rather than top-down making of the event. The expansion of mobile digital technologies gives rise to multiple temporalities and trajectories of events through the media.

This article takes sound as its analytical point of departure in asking the following question: What does sound do in television news? Exploring the conventions of sound used by producers of Israeli television news, from the signature tune to the various news items, this study reveals the role of sound as part of journalistic framing practices but also as an insidious element challenging the visual as well as the construction of framing. We suggest that inquiring into the acoustic features of television news may offer new insights into the news genre and its practices. We propose the term soundscape as a complementary conceptual metaphor to framing with the aim of counteracting the visual bias dominating the academic discourse of political communication and journalism studies.

This article explores the elective affinities between autism and new media. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) provides a uniquely apt case for considering the conceptual link between mental disability and media technology. Tracing the history of the disorder through its various media connections and connotations, we propose a narrative of the transition from impaired sociability in person to fluent social media by network. New media introduce new affordances for people with ASD: The Internet provides habitat free of the burdens of face-to-face encounters, high-tech industry fares well with the purported special abilities of those with Asperger’s syndrome, and digital technology offers a rich metaphorical depository for the condition as a whole. Running throughout is a gender bias that brings communication and technology into the fray of biology versus culture. Autism invites us to rethink our assumptions about communication in the digital age, accounting for both the pains and possibilities it entails.

Recent studies in psychiatry reveal an acceptance of trauma through the media. Traditionally restricted to immediate experience, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is now expanding to include mediated experience. How did this development come about? How does mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its consequences? This essay addresses these questions through three cases: (1) ‘trauma film paradigm’, an early 1960s research program that employed films to simulate traumatic effects; (2) the psychiatric study into the clinical effects of watching catastrophic events on television, culminating with the September 11 attacks; (3) reports on drone operators who exhibit PTSD symptoms after flying combat missions away from the war zone. The recognition of mediated trauma marks a qualitative change in the understanding of media effects, rendering the impact literal and the consequences clinical. What informs recent speculations about the possibility of trauma through media is a conceptual link between visual media and contemporary conceptions of trauma.

‘Media witnessing’ designates a new configuration of mediation, representation and experience that is involved in the transformation of our sense of historical significance. It refers to the witnessing performed in, by and through the media: the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events. Media witnessing is defined by three overlapping domains of practice: (1) the ways in which ubiquitous audiovisual media make the potential significance of incidentally recorded events available for immediate public reproduction; (2) the organization of interpersonal and mass media as hybrid assemblages of human and technological agents with shifting boundaries that defy traditional models of mass communication, producing ad-hoc communities of attention on a global scale; (3) the incorporation of audiences into a system of perpetual vigilance and the creation of cosmopolitan risk publics who perceive their commonality through representations of shared vulnerability. Media witnessing thus marks the age of the post-media event: it casts the audience as the ultimate addressee and primary producer, making the collective both the subject and the object of everyday witnessing.

In September 2012 a series of violent protests erupted in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia in response to a YouTube film that caricatured Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The protests, which were directed primarily towards the US where the short film was made, echoed the similar violent reactions to the publications of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Were the protesters right to express their anger at what were evidently provocative and offensive media representations of their faith? Were the filmmakers and cartoonists entitled to freedom of speech and is this freedom limitless? Or was this a clear case of media harm? And what, if any, is the responsibility of the audiences who not only watch and read but also produce, circulate and ‘like’, potentially harmful content?

Modern technological media and psychoanalysis are historically coextensive, so argues Friedrich Kittler. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, a profound transformation had taken place in the material conditions of communication—what Kittler terms Aufschreibesystem (literally “writing-down system,” translated as “discourse network”). 1 Prior to that transformation, writing, in its various manifestations, was the dominant medium of information storage and transmission. When writing was the prevailing writing-down system, all forms of data had to pass through the “bottleneck of the signifier” (GFT ,p .4). With the technological transformation that followed, the symbolic mediation of writing was supplemented by the nonsymbolic writing-down system of sight and sound: the audio channel of the phonograph and the visual channel of the cinematograph. As opposed to writing, these media are unselective inscription devices, capturing the intentional together with the unintentional, data and noise, indiscriminately as they come. It is against this

Browsing through Web sites dedicated to information about autism, one might come across a list, which is featured on a number of sites, of famous people with autistic traits. Alongside historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Glen Gould, there are also names of fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, Mr. Bean, and Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener. 1 At first blush, this might seem strange, yet somehow unsurprising, given the extraordinary run of interpretations the figure of Bartleby has had. It is yet another entry on that long list of Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential, and theological commentaries the scrivener has inspired. However, a closer look into the various historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts implied by the juxtaposition of Bartleby and autism re veals a complex network of discourses relating to the problem of human communication—or rather, human …

This paper aims to demonstrate the relevance of media witnessing – the witnessing performed in, by, and through the media – in situations of asymmetric conflict. The expansion of media technologies has brought new opportunities for both individuals and organizations to bear witness to events and broadcast their reports to increasingly wider audiences. Practices of media witnessing have become crucial in situations of asymmetric conflict, where the battle for public opinion brings into play different resources than those utilized on conventional battlegrounds. We describe media witnessing as a field in which various forces, resources, and agents compete for recognition by media audiences. We provide a framework for analysis and apply it to two documentary films produced shortly after the clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian forces in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of media witnessing in the context of contemporary asymmetric conflicts.

This essay considers the role of the radio in the mediation of trauma during the 1961 Eichmann trial. It is argued that radio broadcasts from the courtroom occasioned a transformation in the status of Holocaust survivors in Israel, who had been previously seen as deeply traumatized, unable or unwilling to speak about their experiences. Taking to the airwaves facilitated a shift in the conditions by which survivors' testimonies could find public articulation. As such, the Eichmann trial provides a compelling case of the significance of media in transforming private traumas into a collective or cultural trauma.

Contemporary media saturation requires us to rethink the notion of crisis. This paper characterizes crisis not in terms of isolable moments and significant events, but as a generalized and routine background condition—a persistent crisis-readiness. It is sustained and performed by a new media configuration: an assemblage of mediation, representation and experience that we call “media witnessing.” Focusing on how media witnessing foregrounds the immanent decisiveness of everyday existence, the interconnectivity and unpredictability of mediated networks, and the mutual vulnerability of dispersed publics, the paper calls for an understanding of crisis as a perpetual condition of transformative possibility.

The Stalags, an Israeli pulp fiction series whose advent coincided with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, portrayed sadomasochistic scenarios between SS female guards and Allied soldiers in POW camps. Written in Hebrew by native Israelis, these cheap pocketbooks were enormously popular with Israeli teenagers, many of whom were children of Holocaust survivors. We posit the Stalags (a) as a fictional counterpart of the trial, complementing the legal procedure with feats of the imagination, and (b) as a text upon which the Israeli young generation negotiated issues of power and identity.

In his book Justice in Jerusalem, Gideon Hausner provides a detailed account on the prosecution and sentencing of SS Obersturmbannfu¨hrer Adolf Eichmann by an Israeli court tribunal in 1961. As chief prosecutor, Hausner focuses mainly on the legal aspects of the trial with only occasional references to its impact outside the courtroom. Among such references, his depiction of listening to radio broadcasts from the trial clearly stands out: The radio (we had no television) provided a very wide coverage, with the main features of the trial broadcast directly from the courtroom. People would often close their shops to listen; bus and taxi drivers were reported to have stopped their vehicles when the proceedings grew too moving. School children brought transistor radios to school, and the teachers had to stop work from time to time to allow group listening. The proceedings could be heard in the public streets, for the radio voices emerged from every open window.

This essay attempts to mobilize some key concepts developed in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas into communication thought framework. The main argument is that Levinas's speculation on ethics as first philosophy provides an alternative perspective from which to view the relation between communication and ethics. At its core is the concept of interruption. It is suggested that ethical communication may lie in the interruption of communication—in instances where lateral exchange or concurrence between minds are troubled. Such interruptions, however, do not mark the end of concern for another, but rather its very beginning, for it is in such instances that communication faces the challenge of alterity. While bringing one to the verge of discursive possibilities, interruption gives rise to communication otherwise conceived, to exposure and vulnerability, and thereby to the possibility of responding to the Other.

This paper examines perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a communicational boundary: autism. It explores how autism has become an object of knowledge in disciplines concerned with mental and social life and identifies modes of communicability and incommunicability that have been deployed in clinical, scientific and social research. Such polarized demarcation works to purify conceptual zones of communication from refractory elements and, hence, from alterity. The paper draws on speculations by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas to suggest that, rather than marking the end of interactive potential, incommunicability is in fact internal to and constitutive of communicability.

This article explores the ethical dimensions of computer‐mediated communication held in chatrooms. The philosophical underpinnings refer to the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, specifically to concepts relating to the ethics of Other‐oriented communication. The main argument is that this medium presents serious difficulty for Other‐oriented communication due to the potential for control over online interaction. This control is manifested in three ways: the ability to control online presence of Self and Other, the ability to manage exposure and vulnerability and thereby suspend surprise, and the means by which text‐based communication provides a sense of a separate‐space‐shared‐time. Based on this analysis, two tactics are suggested by which one might be able to resist control and allow for a more Other‐oriented interaction.

Street names are mundane media through which the past is commemorated and introduced into the public sphere. Viewed from a semiotic perspective, street names constitute a spatial-text produced over time, capturing the political, social and cultural climates in which it is formed. In this article we propose an analysis of street names in four Israeli towns of different social, political and demographic backgrounds. The study is based on a two-stage analysis: an analysis of the local narratives and a hermeneutic reading of the street maps as spatial-texts. This is followed by a quantitative summary of street names according to categories. By studying practices of naming and renaming, and deciphering key elements in these spatial-texts, we conclude that street names reflect the changing character of the Israeli political, social and cultural orders. As such, they are indicative of shifts occurring in the social production of the Israeli collective memory.

Whereas ethical questions have challenged concepts of self, identity, and society, the concept of freedom of speech--and its place in recent discussions on pluralism and multiculturalism--has remained largely unproblematized. The challenge I wish to propose here does not touch directly on the positive right to speak, nor on the limitations impeding free speech, but rather on the other side of speaking, on the Other's side of this freedom. Does the concept of freedom of speech carry in itself and as such an ethical significance? Freedom of speech has been an important element in modem social philosophy, occupying the works of traditional liberalists such as John Stuart Mill, progressive thinkers like John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, as well as the critical pragmatist Jurgen Habermas, to name but a few. Such accounts regarded the freedom of speech as a social practice based on the stature of the speaking self, on its innate right to speak and to be heard. It is the right to a "podium"--a space and a time in the public sphere--and the right to declare a priori: "I have something to say important enough for others to hear." Hence, the first word of this speech is an assertion of importance, not only of the speech per se, but also the importance of the speaker: self-importance. Is this kind of speaker interested in something beyond his or her fully legitimate right and ability to perform as speaker? Is there any room for the silent Other? Moreover, doesn't the practice of freedom of speech tacitly presuppose that someone else is already relegated to listening, to the passive side of this action? If this is indeed true, such a way of communicating would be, to use Gemma Corradi Fiumara's thoughtful insight, a reduced-by-half notion of logos--an address by the one who knows how to speak but does not (need to) know how to listen [54-55]. A halved model of speaker and address would thereby constitute only half of an ethical discourse. The remaining half would lie where speech does not eclipse the Other's silence, where the Other's silence has its "say." How can

The vast collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies presents invaluable historical insights but poses challenges for manual analysis. This paper leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore the USC Shoah Foundation Holocaust testimony corpus. By treating testimonies as structured question-and-answer sections, we apply topic modeling to identify key themes. We experiment with BERTopic, which leverages recent advances in language modeling technology. We align testimony sections into fixed parts, revealing the evolution of topics across the corpus of testimonies. This highlights both a common narrative schema and divergences between subgroups based on age and gender. We introduce a novel method to identify testimonies within groups that exhibit atypical topic distributions resembling those of other groups. This study offers unique insights into the complex narratives of Holocaust survivors, demonstrating the power of NLP to illuminate historical discourse and identify potential deviations in survivor experiences.

The task of topical segmentation is well studied, but previous work has mostly addressed it in the context of structured, well-defined segments, such as segmentation into paragraphs, chapters, or segmenting text that originated from multiple sources. We tackle the task of segmenting running (spoken) narratives, which poses hitherto unaddressed challenges. As a test case, we address Holocaust survivor testimonies, given in English. Other than the importance of studying these testimonies for Holocaust research, we argue that they provide an interesting test case for topical segmentation, due to their unstructured surface level, relative abundance (tens of thousands of such testimonies were collected), and the relatively confined domain that they cover. We hypothesize that boundary points between segments correspond to low mutual information between the sentences proceeding and following the boundary. Based on this hypothesis, we explore a range of algorithmic approaches to the task, building on previous work on segmentation that uses generative Bayesian modeling and state-of-the-art neural machinery. Compared to manually annotated references, we find that the developed approaches show considerable improvements over previous work.

This project attempts to question the way the relation between communication and ethics has traditionally been conceptualized, and to offer an alternative perspective on that relation. An implicit premise in many communication theories is that successful communication is ethically favorable, particularly in facilitating ideals such as greater understanding, participation and like-mindedness. Contrary to that view, this project proposes that ethical communication may lie in the interruption of communication, in instances wherein communication falls short, goes astray or even fails. Such interruptions, however, do not mark the end of ethical communication but rather its very beginning, for it is in such moments that communication faces the challenge of otherness. Mobilizing relevant ideas from the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the field of communication studies, this project proposes the concept of interruption as the main correlative between ethics and communication. The investigation then sets out to explore three limit-cases in which the stakes of ethical communication are most crucial: understanding and misunderstanding, communicability and incommunicability, and silence and speech. The discussion employs a distinctive approach to study the place of alterity in communication: dislocation—a double gesture which implies both tampering with the proper activity of communicational procedures and pointing to the ethical possibilities opened up by interruptions. The issues above are addressed through critical analyses of themes such as: universal language or the undoing of Babel; the ethical significance of misunderstanding and the challenge introduced by translation; autism as a paradigmatic case of incommunicability in medical, scientific and social discourses; the epistemological status and the ethical stakes of incommunicability; and, finally, the ethical dimension of free speech, the significance of silence and the responsibility to the silent Other.