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The presence and significance of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in society have been steadily increasing since 2000. While its potential benefits are widely acknowledged, concerns about its impact on society, the economy, and ethics have also been raised. Consequently, artificial intelligence has garnered widespread attention in news media and popular culture. As mass media plays a pivotal role in shaping public perception, it is crucial to evaluate opinions expressed in these outlets. Understanding the public's perception of artificial intelligence is essential for effective public policy and decision making. This paper presents the results of a sentiment analysis study conducted on WIRED magazine's coverage of artificial intelligence between January 2018 and April 2023. The objective of the study is to assess the prevailing opinions towards artificial intelligence in articles from WIRED magazine, which is widely recognized as one of the most reputable and influential publications in the field of technology and innovation. Using two sentiment analysis techniques, AFINN and VADER, a total of 4265 articles were analyzed for positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. Additionally, a term frequency analysis was conducted to categorize articles based on the frequency of mentions of artificial intelligence. Finally, a linear regression analysis of the mean positive and negative sentiments was performed to examine trends for each month over a five-year period. The results revealed a leading pattern: there was a predominant positive sentiment with an upward trend in both positive and negative sentiments. This polarization of sentiment suggests a shift towards more extreme positions, which should influence public policy and decision making in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first years of his pontificate, Pope Francis has stimulated significant changes of perspective fostering astonishment, hope and even fear. Social media are probably one of the most crucial frontlines for his efforts as suggested by official statements and policies. The impact/presence of the new papacy on Web 2.0 networks still engenders blurry considerations and assessments between optimism and risks of mere superficiality. Taking a sociology of the immagination perspective, the author focuses on the concepts of media centre and myth analyzing the new media-related policies and strategies applied by the Vatican, and the online icon of Pope Francis as an image spread across multiple platforms and audiences. Online environments will be interpreted both as socio-cultural constructs per se and domains ruled by specific patterns and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending.

The presence and significance of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in society have been steadily increasing since 2000. While its potential benefits are widely acknowledged, concerns about its impact on society, the economy, and ethics have also been raised. Consequently, artificial intelligence has garnered widespread attention in news media and popular culture. As mass media plays a pivotal role in shaping public perception, it is crucial to evaluate opinions expressed in these outlets. Understanding the public’s perception of artificial intelligence is essential for effective public policy and decision making. This paper presents the results of a sentiment analysis study conducted on WIRED magazine’s coverage of artificial intelligence between January 2018 and April 2023. The objective of the study is to assess the prevailing opinions towards artificial intelligence in articles from WIRED magazine, which is widely recognized as one of the most reputable and influential publications in the field of technology and innovation. Using two sentiment analysis techniques, AFINN and VADER, a total of 4265 articles were analyzed for positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. Additionally, a term frequency analysis was conducted to categorize articles based on the frequency of mentions of artificial intelligence. Finally, a linear regression analysis of the mean positive and negative sentiments was performed to examine trends for each month over a five-year period. The results revealed a leading pattern: there was a predominant positive sentiment with an upward trend in both positive and negative sentiments. This polarization of sentiment suggests a shift towards more extreme positions, which should influence public policy and decision making in the near future.

This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: The creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of the human mind. Based on a content analysis of articles on AI published in two magazines, the Scientific American and the New Scientist, which were aimed at a broad readership of scientists, engineers and technologists, three dominant patterns in the construction of the AI myth are identified: (1) the recurrence of analogies and discursive shifts, by which ideas and concepts from other fields were employed to describe the functioning of AI technologies; (2) a rhetorical use of the future, imagining that present shortcomings and limitations will shortly be overcome and (3) the relevance of controversies around the claims of AI, which we argue should be considered as an integral part of the discourse surrounding the AI myth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relation between post 9/11 imaginary and digital entertainment's audiences. Its aim is to enlighten potential players' perception of such an influence by exploring game service platforms – that is, online spaces with peculiar functions that are getting a foothold in the sector. By following the leading concepts of 'premediation' (Grusin, 2010) and 'platform' (Gillespie, 2010), an empirical investigation was directed about the game The Division, which glaringly exploits references to 9/11, in relation with Twitch.tv (live streaming) and Steam (multi-hub with several features, from user-generated content upload to discussion) environments. For the first 20 days from the release, multiple data were gathered daily (e.g. streaming chats, threads and artworks) and framed with a discourse/visual analysis (e.g. Gee, 2010). Results show that connections to 9/11 were perceived in experiencing game mechanics (e.g. multiplayer mode) rather than in discussing setting or plot. A preventive attitude against other players emerged as winning strategy and potential bridge to an 'interactive premediation' in media consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on examples of digital media corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, we argue that corporational determinism helps companies to market more effectively their products and to build stronger claims in support of their right to inform debates and decisions about the governance of digital technologies. Critical media scholarship should counteract the narratives of corporational determinism with more sophisticated approaches that underline the role of a wider range of actors in media change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software is usually studied in terms of the changes triggered by its operations in the material world. Yet to understand its social and cultural impact, one needs to examine also the different narratives that circulate about it. Software's opacity, in fact, makes it prone to being translated into a plurality of narratives that help people make sense of its functioning and presence. Drawing from the case of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, widely considered the first chatbot ever created, this article proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of 'biographies of media' to illuminate the dynamics and implications of software's discursive life. The case of ELIZA is particularly relevant in this regard because it became the centre of competing narratives, whose trajectories transcended the actual functioning of this programme and shaped key controversies about the implications of computing and artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of the semiology of image, this article investigates the recurrent adoption of the iconicity of cultural signs for the construction of media imaginary. It deals with contemporary narratives that seek to produce veridical connotation, which drives the image producers to the cultural relativism of discourses – signs for interpretation, recognition and stimulation of the public they dialogue with. Excited by current examples of creative, conscious, estimated value of the constitution of contemporary communication, also from the cultural symbolic relations – feeders of media imaginary, the research proposes a theoretical reflection on the object and the descriptive reading of examples that fall into intertextual narratives and contemplate hybrid images. Its references are theoretically based on processes of hybridization, intersections between art and communication in the creative process of advertising, and intertextuality in media content.

Phenomenology, Sociology, Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis have accumulated different methods and knowledge on the imaginary. Nevertheless, the crucial connection between the social imagining and communication has not always been truly examined. In this article, we take the imaginary (seen as a symbolic thought of images) and communication (seen as a process of symbolic reproduction) as correlated notions, and work upon a communicational matrix of the imaginary. We emphasize three key elements of the imaginary: by pointing to the verbal-iconic, technical and mediatized dimensions we will be paying special attention to the media imaginary and the effects of its commemorative logic to the propagation of public imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recovers the popular imaginaries surrounding an obsolete video game platform, the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES), through a thematic discourse analysis of British and North American gaming magazines from the 1990s. Released in Japan in 1990, the Neo Geo AES was marketed as a home video game system capable of bridging the gap between the public space of the gaming arcade and the domestic environment of the home. “Imaginaries” in this context refer to the dreams and fantasies that accompanied the Neo Geo AES’s negotiation of arcade and home spaces as well as the discourses, images, ideas, and beliefs that helped mold its identity as a cultural object. Gaming magazines, I argue, help articulate how the system’s failure was tied to its unsuccessful navigation of cultural tensions during a period when gaming culture underwent a rapid relocation from the arcade to the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent emergence of e-readers and electronic books (e-books) has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progress. We argue that in order to comprehend such narratives, we need to inscribe them in the broader history of media. The emergence of new media, in fact, has often been accompanied by narratives about the possible disappearance of older media: the introduction of television, for instance, inspired claims about the forthcoming death of film and radio. As a recurrent narrative shaping the reception of media innovation, the myth of the disappearing medium helps us to make sense of the transformations that media change provokes in our everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first years of his pontificate, Pope Francis has stimulated significant changes of perspective fostering astonishment, hope and even fear. Social media are probably one of the most crucial frontlines for his efforts as suggested by official statements and policies. The impact/presence of the new papacy on Web 2.0 networks still engenders blurry considerations and assessments between optimism and risks of mere superficiality. Taking a sociology of the immagination perspective, the author focuses on the concepts of media centre and myth analyzing the new media-related policies and strategies applied by the Vatican, and the online icon of Pope Francis as an image spread across multiple platforms and audiences. Online environments will be interpreted both as socio-cultural constructs per se and domains ruled by specific patterns and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the imaginary and the ideology of female bodies and beauty, through the eyes of the media. We analyzed the covers and editorials of the magazine Trip para Mulheres (TPM), by Trip Publishing house. The clipping time was from May 2012 to August 2013, due to the TPM Manifesto, described as a move against women stereotypes and cliches. We carried out an exploratory, bibliographical and documentary research, with image analysis, in order to achieve this goal. The study of the magazine covers in this paper were based on the iconographic analysis and iconological interpretation proposed by Panofsky (2009). The work is also based on the precepts of Cultural Studies and (visual culture) visuality, by Hall & Eagleton and Belting, CatalàDomènech and Baitello Jr.; on the imagery and media imagery, proposed by Durand, Morin and Contrera; and, finally, on the understandings of consumption by Haug, Baudrillard and Barbosa, and Campbell. Thus, we observed that the TPM magazine and its TPM Manifesto see themselves as splendid and feminist; however, the images (and even some texts) of the covers are not consistent with their argument, which led us to infer that, although commendable, the TPM Manifesto proposal did not pull away from the imaginary and current ideologies about female body and beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]