Search

This article explores the presentation of fake news, the most salient kind of disinformation, focusing neither on its text-based content nor its image-based form, but instead on its overall aesthetic composition—and how and why that composition contributes to the proliferation of disinformation. It begins with an analysis of “real news”—the genre that fake news attempts to copy—and its reliance on what Gaye Tuchman calls the “web of facticity” to communicate “good” information. It then turns to examine how fake news uses the logic of graphic design to exploit features of the web of facticity to create a “web of plausibility”—the web of facticity’s evil twin—to generate momentum for circulation through the analysis of several specific aesthetic features of the news genre. The conclusion offers some possible ways that this sort of perspective can better equip us to help stop the spread of disinformation.

Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 290 pp. There is a simple question that almost always haunts [...]

This article draws from the insights offered by discourse analysis and the study of gesture to examine imagination as a product of, and resource for, social action. Using data collected during ethnographic fieldwork at an architecture firm, the article explores how imagining can emerge from a group of interactants who use many semiotic media, including talk, gestures, and drawings, to imagine something together. Following the groundwork laid by Benedict Spinoza, this perspective moves the "object" of imagination out of the brain, away from mental imagery and into the space in which shared activities take place. Such a move has implications for rethinking imagination in terms of communicative interaction and social activity. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

For many years, scholars have sought to track and explain how objects come to have layered, contested, and evolving meanings over time. This article examines the potential contributions and limitations of a palimpsest theory of objects to help explain such meaning-making practices. A palimpsest is a tablet or parchment from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make space for another text. This proposed theory investigates in what ways objects are palimpsests (literally and metaphorically), able to concurrently contain multiple meanings as each new one is inscribed over past ones. Drawing from Peircean semiotics and current palimpsest theory, this article considers the meaning-making practices of Guanyin (the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion) statues as a case study. With Guanyin figurines, the processes of inscription and erasure can be systematically recorded in contexts of production and consumption by tracking the observed behaviors and expressed beliefs of different social actors and documenting the materiality of these objects as they move through physical and social spaces. The ethnography of things presented here both explores the processes that interweave meanings through Guanyin statues and tests the viability of an overarching palimpsest theory of objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatic approaches can effectively address questions of cultural dynamics—how culture is renewed, contested, or changed in historical situations. The practice-oriented direction of much of contemporary cognitive science offers an emerging opportunity to more fully integrate thought and emotion into anthropological pragmatism. Here I urge attention to a realm of enacted culture that illustrates how certain interactive processes bring cultural conventions into a communicative environment where they are renewed, transformed, created. As an example, I discuss depictions, improvisational performances in which speakers use material resources such as their hands or voices to formulate and portray thoughts. In a close analysis of three short narratives, I show that depictions are used by speakers to help to create an affect-rich environment in which cultural conventions are introduced into interactional space, whence they become subject to negotiation. It is not only in these spontaneous and improvisational practices that cognition and culture unfold in time as a dialectical interplay of mind and environment; this also occurs in stylized formats such as public rituals and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]