Browsing by Subject "Communication"

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In 1949, Bell Lab mathematician Claude Shannon modeled telephone communication by assigning statistic regularity to the rather irregular usage of human language. His lab mate Warren Weaver took a step further, putting the novel Alice in Wonderland through a translation machine in pursuit of a unified form of intercultural communication. Amidst the ideological polarities of the Cold War, this rationalist pursuit was idealistic. Yet today it still guides the scholarly approach to intercultural communication. This approach to data analysis poses a problem: the corporate sector simply has far superior systems of aggregating data and manipulating information, while individual academics would either have to ally with the world’s most popular social media or be forever trapped in isolation and by deficits. My work, on the contrary, focuses on the advantages of studying deficits. It questions why and how details are deliberately stripped out, why and how experience is transformed into algorithmic power, all for creating the impression of mere “data.”

This dissertation has two main objectives, one inwardly focused, the other outwardly oriented: first, to create a dialogue between literary studies and media studies through discussions of informational loss; second, to shift the narrow focus of North American and German media theory by drawing broadly on the material history of literature, media, and art from modern and contemporary China. China studies, a field born out of Cold War contexts in the West, have thus far developed under the growing pressure to track the particularities of this cultural other like China, without paying much attention to what documents are doing to a history rife with deliberately omitted information. This dissertation rectifies this mistreatment of lost details. Targeting communication scholar Marshall McLuhan’s provocation that “the medium is the message,” we may say that what is missing is the message; preserving what is missing in a cultural other end up making us not see China at all.

How do we approach objects that are opaque and always disappearing from view? This study locates this issue at the intersection of media theory and literary theory through reviewing key historical moments in both fields: this study examines the archival compression of the historical figure and the corpus called “Lu Xun” (1881-1936) to rethink the destructive role of print media in constructing Chinese modernity; returns to the industrial production of “books to lose” in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to rethink the inevitable, functional bias of preservation in historiography; reviews the 1980s’ indulgence in a kind of “information fetishism” to reveal that opacity, too, can be a political ideal; and evaluates the claim of China’s 5G and AI “authoritarian networks” to expose the problematic metaphors of informatics. Each of the four chapters draws on literary and artistic texts, including Lu Xun’s untranslated essays (chapter 1), Yan Lianke’s fictional historiographies (chapter 2), Liu Cixin’s politicized science fiction (chapter 3), and emerging media arts in China (chapter 4). Referring to what tends to be hidden by acts of collecting, what becomes opaque, and what gets erased when the technological context is neglected, I borrow the term “lossy” from computer science. This term circumvents the notion of history based on static archives and their imaginary solidity. Interweaving two distinct threads of exposition (media studies and literature), this dissertation provides a multi-fold narrative about history, politics, and China.

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Throughout the life of the Church, certain habits have been cultivated to shape the identity of its community and deepen our communion with God. We see in the writings of the Desert Fathers that attentiveness is one habit that people of faith have taken care to cultivate to better connect with God. Contemporary of the Desert Fathers, Saint Augustine, also speaks to attentiveness and its relation to time. What both the Desert writers and Augustine understand is that our ability to connect with God depends on our ability to be attentive in the present moment.

This thesis will argue that an embodied, present attentiveness is foundational to a relationship with God; furthermore, given the patterns of attention developed around Wireless Mobile Devices (i.e. smartphones) and the strong pull on its users for their constant interaction, I argue that the practices created around these devices do in fact hinder one's ability to connect with God, despite their other potential for good. The thesis employs qualitative research in the form of literature reviews. First, drawing from the practices of the Desert Fathers and Augustine's understanding of the relationship between time, memory, and knowledge of God, I make a case for the discipline of embodied attentiveness to the present moment as foundational to our relationship with God. I then draw from current psychological, sociological and anthropological insights to model how the current technological landscape places particular pressures on an embodied present attentiveness, with specific focus on the Wireless Mobile Device (WMD), commonly known as the smartphone. Finally, I place in conversation the findings from these reviews; leading to an assessment on the patterns technology creates around attentiveness.

People are becoming increasingly aware and concerned that the Internet and Wireless Mobile Devices are not neutral mediums and consistent exposure (and use) of these mediums is affecting us. We will see in this thesis that not only are habits of communication shifting, but also we are literally being rewired as our neural pathways are firing into uncharted territory. While psychological, sociological, and philosophical assessments of communication technologies and the self are critical to understand various implications on attentiveness, the goal of this thesis is to articulate the practices that the use of Wireless Mobile Devices cultivates regarding attentiveness through a theological lens.

As we begin to understand the concerns of the Saints who have gone before us, combined with understanding the shifting landscape of technology as it pertains to attentiveness, we can imagine why it is that the Church ought to be concerned with the continued cultivation of the discipline of attentiveness. Rather than simply "sounding the alarm" that technology is detrimental to our spiritual formation, however, this thesis will attempt to help the Church have a more nuanced understanding of why social media inhibits our ability to be attentive, as it examines to what end (telos) our attention is being drawn. After developing a more robust understanding of why a present, embodied attentiveness is foundational to our relationship with God, we will be able to enter into conversations regarding social media that are nuanced beyond it having "positive" and "negative" effects.