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Metaphors have always played a fundamental role in conceptualizing digital realities. Their everyday use, however, makes them challenging to recognize, as they have solidified in our shared imagination. This crystallization is precisely what enables a community of interpreters to attach meaning to a signifier, allowing mutual understanding.
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The use of visual metaphors is a popular method of advertising nowadays. This paper briefly reviews the theoretical framework of metaphorical expression in advertising, and particularly the use of visual metaphors. It then continues with presenting results and findings from an empirical study on the use of visual metaphors in the ads of high-tech products. Given the nature of metaphors, the analysis is based on both qualitative and quantitative readings of the data, in order to reach more insightful conclusions. Based on the research findings and following the theoretical introduction, the paper concludes with implications and guidelines for the marketing utility of exploring the meaning and other features of visual metaphors.
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As digital technologies proliferate, older adults are still facing significant challenges in achieving sustainable digital empowerment. This qualitative study examines the metaphorical registers spontaneously mobilized by seniors when discussing digital tools. It also highlights subjective semiotic framings which hinder their digital acculturation. Through ethnographic observations of digital literacy training, we identify diverse metaphorical projections conveying apprehensions (technologies as “nests of problems”, “magical” realms) but also motivating drivers towards meaningful digital appropriation. The findings underscore the importance of symbolic mediation strategies, in order to deconstruct inhibiting traditional theories and foster technology uses rooted in the life contexts of seniors. By elucidating the complex interplay of cognitive, emotional and cultural tensions shaping digital relationships, our research project argues for designing digital training less as technical instruction than as holistic empowerment journeys integrating identity-related dimensions. Ultimately, research on these semiotic foundations contributes to broader societal efforts that ensure equal voices for diverse knowledge approaches in an increasingly AI-dominated world. Only through such inclusive mediation efforts can we truly accompany digital “immigrants” toward affirmative technological citizenship.
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This essay aims to reflect critically on how the technomagic concept, elucidated by the French philosopher Michel Maffesoli, proposes itself as a new way of understanding the contemporary aesthetics of the digital based on the immersive visual effects of liquid, dreamlike, and ethereal poetic sounds and visualities present in several examples of artistic contemporary productions. This philosophical and aesthetic perspective, brought about by technomagic evocates liquid and aquatic metaphors of digital artistic creations, as well as a way of understanding social human relationships in the digital sphere in an optimistic context of re-enchantment for human existence. For him, it was a process of feminization of the world, evocating mythical metaphors of cultural imaginaries and symbolics. Methodologically, this work intends to contemplate cultural semiotics as an enlightening approach by understanding digital culture as technological mediation for analyzing digital language which reflects the paths of technomagic in the expressions of technological art characteristics of digital media.This essay aims to reflect critically on how the technomagic concept, elucidated by the French philosopher Michel Maffesoli, proposes itself as a new way of understanding the contemporary aesthetics of the digital based on the immersive visual effects of liquid, dreamlike, and ethereal poetic sounds and visualities present in several examples of artistic contemporary productions. This philosophical and aesthetic perspective, brought about by technomagic evocates liquid and aquatic metaphors of digital artistic creations, as well as a way of understanding social human relationships in the digital sphere in an optimistic context of re-enchantment for human existence. For him, it was a process of feminization of the world, evocating mythical metaphors of cultural imaginaries and symbolics. Methodologically, this work intends to contemplate cultural semiotics as an enlightening approach by understanding digital culture as technological mediation for analyzing digital language which reflects the paths of technomagic in the expressions of technological art characteristics of digital media.This essay aims to reflect critically on how the technomagic concept, elucidated by the French philosopher Michel Maffesoli, proposes itself as a new way of understanding the contemporary aesthetics of the digital based on the immersive visual effects of liquid, dreamlike, and ethereal poetic sounds and visualities present in several examples of artistic contemporary productions. This philosophical and aesthetic perspective, brought about by technomagic evocates liquid and aquatic metaphors of digital artistic creations, as well as a way of understanding social human relationships in the digital sphere in an optimistic context of re-enchantment for human existence. For him, it was a process of feminization of the world, evocating mythical metaphors of cultural imaginaries and symbolics. Methodologically, this work intends to contemplate cultural semiotics as an enlightening approach by understanding digital culture as technological mediation for analyzing digital language which reflects the paths of technomagic in the expressions of technological art characteristics of digital media.
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Through a post-colonial approach to crisis communication within transboundary contexts over the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the paper investigates the digital information warfare in East Eurasia aggregated by Google News in the first two weeks of the war. Analysed countries are Georgia, Poland, Serbia, and Turkey. The study tries to unveil major sources, frames and narratives among subaltern and ‘other’ locations while inhabiting the platform to discover affordances indications. Platforms and news aggregators emerged as relevant in current information warfare, with a hybrid composition of old and new tactics, actors and tools.
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Hakim Sana’i Ghaznavi was a prominent Iranian poet and gnostic who lived at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries after the Hijra. This paper aims to present this poet and the role he played in the development of Persian gnostic literature. The paper was written using a descriptive-research method, relying on library materials. For this purpose, the poet’s works were selected and analyzed, as well as the sources written about his life and poetry. Research shows that Sana’i spent his childhood and youth in Ghazna, and it was in this city that he studied the sciences and knowledge of the time. In his youth, Sana’i traveled to Balkh, where he met Muhammed ibn Mansur Sarakhsi, a Sufi and scholar of that time, and spent some time in his hanikah. Sana’i died in Ghazna, which is located in today’s Afghanistan, in the first half of the sixth century AD. He left behind valuable works, including ethical, philosophical and social masnavis, and Divan (which consists of ghazals, rubais and qasidas), which had a huge impact on culture and literature even after his death. Sana’i revolutionized the process of Persian poetry. Each literary form of Sana’i’s works in some way constitutes a new literary genre in Persian literature. Actually, his qasidas are the beginning of a new process, masnavis are the introduction of his innovative thinking, and, finally, his ghazals set him apart from the ghazal poets of earlier periods in terms of expressing a new and innovative mood. Therefore, Sana’i is considered an epochal poet, because there are few poets who have introduced innovations in several fields, and the influence of his words will be seen centuries later in the works of poets after him.
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During his African tour at the end of July 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly criticised Africa's hypocritical attitude towards the armed crisis in Ukraine. For the French president, African neutrality is not an either/or, but a thinly veiled support, which allows Russia to escape the Western political strategy of diplomatic isolation. This strategy relies mainly on the strength of the media as a megaphone for the Western reading of the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict. It puts forward the idea of aggression or invasion. This article examines this communication of war deployed through elements of language that draw on the notion of aggression, and its impact in distant lands such as Africa. The text posits that in this Western war of opinion control, political reality actually precedes the voice of their media. Based on the theory of behaviouralism, this article shows that war communication and its results depend entirely on the political consideration of the direct and indirect belligerents by the recipients. In other words, opinions on the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine are not made or broken by the media's reporting or treatment of the news, but by the political reputation that the target audience has long built up about the various belligerents.
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This article argues that communication is what makes engagement ongoing and sustainable when unexpected and unanticipated events disturb long-term planned programs and events. To this end, we embrace the idea of communication as constitutive of organizational practices situated in particular contexts and distributed between publics and technologies. We therefore address communication as a practice that enacts engagement when every planned activity is disrupted and public organizations fail to sustain public participation and inclusion. Based on a study of the new National Action Plan (NAP) public consultations led by the Open Government (OG) of Canada in major crisis situations, this paper highlights how the managers drew on communication practices and interactions between OG and publics to sustain engagement through space and time, and enacted future practices throughout the crisis.
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The socio-numeric platforms and the media practices they generate under the pressure of the attention economy put in crisis the relationship to the image and particularly a visual culture based on representation. They establish a new regime of media visuality, based on the visible and the visibility, which affects the contemporary gaze and its modalities, and which we will define here as the post-visual moment. In this article, we will define the foundations of this new semiotic economy of visibility through its main characteristics. Based on the "continuous visual flow" as the dominant modality of media experience, we will establish how the visibility economy redefines the production, reception and circulation of mediated social meaning.
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This issue examines how digital tools, methods, fields, and research objects transform the methodologies of the humanities and social sciences while challenging the gender system. From a feminist perspective, it argues that science and technology are not “pure,” that digital calculations are not neutral, and that massively collected data do not guarantee the objectivity. Operating on the principle that knowledge production is situated, this issue questions the gender biases that appear in the production and analysis of digital data and explores how these biases can be leveraged to develop more reflexive and inclusive research. By demonstrating how digital technology disrupts gender boundaries, this issue addresses the challenges that quantitative data pose to gender. It investigates how feminist research can enhance digital methods, promote ethical approaches, and critique the concentration of power within socio-digital platforms.
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Approaching the topic from both a feminist, Science and Technology Studies perspectives, this qualitative and quantitative research examines anti-fatphobia and body positivity on Instagram. It delves into how various factors, such as bias, affect, and platform design, influenced the investigative process. The study highlights the methodological and ethical challenges encountered, which ultimately undermined the ethic of care upon which it was built. It examines the interpretations of quantitative and qualitative data, which, being malleable and adaptable, are influenced by various factors such as relational or technical devices, and are continuously redefined. When the data are scrutinized and contextualized, they appear compromising in two ways: they undermine the feminist research approach, and also challenge the feminist principles that are central to the body-positivist movement.
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This methodological article focuses on TikTok and explains how we deployed a feminist methodology and qualitative methods to study women's practices of resistance in TikTok in the face of the prevailing antifeminism there. We detail the implementation of a data densification model and develop a double argument. Firstly, feminist perspectives played an essential role in studying a digital terrain in a complex and rigorous way, without reifying or over- or under-interpreting the realities studied. Secondly, this research design helped reinforce the ethical dimension of the approach. To elaborate on these two points, the article looks at “how to” research women's digital practices in TikTok
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Based on two studies of the experiences of men who have sex with men (MSM) in France, this article examines the challenges faced by the researchers in their digital survey methods. Despite exploring different topics (MSM in the housing estates of the Parisian suburbia; and the use of homosexual dating apps in rural areas), both studies share the use of location-based dating apps to recruit participants. The article therefore questions the peculiarities of using these digital dating platforms as a research method, focusing on researchers’ readings, interpretations, and navigation within these sexually charged digital spaces. It also examines their reintegration into the hierarchy of desirability, analysing the resulting consequences such as flirting, sexual propositions, and legitimacy. In a context of increasing research conducted through the internet and dating apps, particularly led by young researchers, this article aims to explore the methodological challenges of research experiences in the field of humanities and social sciences.
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Our research focused on queer people's experiences on the online dating applications Tinder and HER. We were looking to understand how these dating apps contributed to reinforcing heterosexual cisgender norms and discriminations against queer minorities. To explore this issue, we studied the practices of our interviewees, based on in-depth interviews and their personal data. We also conducted participative observation by creating profiles on the applications. This methodology is therefore based on the algorithmic and human construction of queer representation in virtual dating practices. Our observations allowed us to identify the strategies used by our respondents to present themselves online, according to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
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This article examines the influence of social media, particularly the use of filters, on the perception of body and beauty in adolescent girls. It highlights how the questioning of physical appearance becomes prevalent in adolescence, exacerbated by exposure to retouched images and unrealistic beauty standards conveyed online. We argue that the intensive use of filters can damage young people's self-esteem, creating a dissonance between their real appearance and their online representation, and potentially leading to body image problems and inferiority complexes. Our research highlights the importance of analyzing the effects of digital representations on the perception of beauty standards and body representations, proposing a mixed research methodology that examines the interactions between online and offline spaces. We also examine the psychological implications of adopting these digital norms, which can lead to unrealistic expectations and body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls. Based on the intersection of the state of the art on this issue, a questionnaire and a qualitative survey, the article explores how the filters used in social media contribute to the construction of a gendered and stereotyped body image, and questions the continuity between digital and real identities. We propose an epistemological reflection on how digital data and body perceptions are interpreted and integrated into studies of the body and identity construction.
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The ever growing use of algorithmic and big data-based technologies in both academia and daily life has initiated an emerging critical literature on the social impact of these technologies and the way they are socially biased. Part of these works, from humanities and more recently computer science, draws on feminist epistemologies of knowledge to put into question the actual objectivity of automatic systems. This article details this critical research, relating literature from both fields. It describes the way feminist epistemologies circulate in computer science works on algorithmic bias. It delineates how some of these works embrace these theories to devise ways of operationalizing them, and how they introduce new methods for data science.
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This paper will present the methods and challenges of a collective and interdisciplinary research project (Wikif) which aims to understand how the issue of women scholars’ biographies is approached and taken into account on the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. First, we will introduce the context of the gendered inequalities on the French speaking Wikipedia. We will then explain how the mixed methods we used in this project are relevant and complementary and how we have associated different remediation interventions to it.
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The aim of this article is to reflect on the reorganization of the activities that were usually developed in the presence of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), when, at the beginning of 2020, the museum was closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The use of remote work and the adaptation of activities to the digital regime invite us to think about the implications of immaterial work (Castells, 2007), the subtle boundaries between the domestic space and the work space and the issue of fatigue (Safatle, 2015; Han, 2017; 2021; Zizek, 2020) which is imposed on humanity. We have chosen to listen to four collaborators of the Espaço do Conhecimento, attached to the museum nuclei, in a qualitative collection of testimonies, which seeks to enhance the experiences and the affects they have undergone and identified. We are going to highlight some of the challenges that arise for organizations and employees, faced with a work routine that has changed abruptly in a context of uncertainty and adaptation to multiple hardships.
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Today’s social media (SM) are illustrated by the extensive attention they accord to fast-moving news stories, especially the judicial ones with ruffling effects. These modern media play a real role in shaping attitudes and trends due to their great impact on perceptual experiences and in forging the intellectual, political, and social understandings of individuals, which ultimately shape public opinion, that latent force which, once moved or provoked, can make noise and produce unexpected social reactions. This study aims to put into perspective the effect of social networking platforms on the course and action of justice, where we found that the publication of crime details and news of inquiries, investigations, and trials has a clear repercussion on the exercise of justice. In this regard, and in order to ensure the proper administration of justice, the Moroccan legislator and social platforms have enacted a number of provisions and standards to preserve judicial action, respect human rights, and guarantee the principles inherent to the requirements of a fair judgment. However, it appeared to us that the current provisions do not fully meet this ambition. Therefore, the study concluded with some recommendations aimed at achieving the necessary consonance between the requirements of justice and freedom of expression.
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Our article explores the influence of fake news and digital social networks on public opinion, focusing on the Benalla affair and French laws against information manipulation. It questions the role of platforms like X (e.g., Twitter) as popular tribunals and examines the legal and media implications of the Benalla case. The analysis also highlights the ambiguity of fake news definitions and their impact on judicial decisions. Lastly, it sheds light on the challenges posed by "post-truth" and the transformations induced by technological innovation in the dissemination of falsehoods.
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