School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Author: Hassan, Robert ×

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 26
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    Digitality, Virtual Reality and The ‘Empathy Machine’
    Hassan, R (Taylor & Francis, 2019)
    The essay critiques an aspect of the so-called post-mobile wave of technological change that claims, through the vector of virtual reality (VR), to have created an ‘empathy machine’ that will form the basis of a new journalism. Through VR devices deployed by news organisations such as the New York Times, and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, users will be so powerfully immersed in, for example, a street demonstration, or a refugee camp, that the empathy they feel may constitute a new strengthening of the fourth estate’s civic role in informing and enlightening the public, to the extent that it can go beyond subjective empathy to develop a shared basis for political participation in civil society. The essay considers these claims from the overarching context of what is called digitality. It argues that human agents are analogue agents from an analogue world. Digitality, by contrast, is an essentially alienating sphere wherein digital media cannot replicate analogue communication processes without generating gaps, voids, and ‘missing information’. It further argues, extending insights from Guy Debord, that what VR does produce is a powerful ‘integrated spectacle’ that is a pale substitute for the form of interactive experience needed for the generation of empathy. Taken together, the essay concludes that empathy, a contestable term in its common understanding to begin with, cannot be generated from a digital source. Moreover, should VR become the next dominant post-mobile technological wave as the tech giants predict, then people, users and consumers of VR products in the fourth estate news context, will be further distanced from the analogue reality of the actual world.
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    There Isn’t an App for That: Analogue and Digital Politics in the Age of Platform Capitalism
    Hassan, R (http://mediatheoryjournal.org/, 2018)
    The move toward digitality and its individual-level spread through computer applications (apps) is transforming how we communicate. A major component of this transformation is the political process: both how it is enacted and how effective it is for the promotion of democracy. The political process has become both faster and „lighter‟. The acceleration of the political process has received considerable attention over the last decade, but the essay introduces the idea of a „lightness‟ that accompanies acceleration. This is connected to digitality and its concomitant diminution of our inherent human analogue capacities. The analogue capacities that enabled democratic politics in its modern version have been eclipsed by what are their digital antitheses. An analogue engendered political process continues to exist, but it functions at the elite levels of business and government; whereas the digitally-created „lightness‟ of the virtual sphere constitutes the political process for the growing millions. The essay argues that this is an essentially alienating sphere that offers little by way of the traction and roots necessary for democratic and inclusive politics to grow and flourish.
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    Tech, Time and Jihad
    HASSAN, R (The American University in Cairo Press, 2016)
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    Analogue time, analogue people and the digital eclipsing of modern political time
    HASSAN, R ; Hom, A (E-International Relations Publishing, 2016-07-07)
    Today, a small but emerging strand of literature has emerged to meet questions concerning time and temporality and its relationship to International Relations head on. This volume provides a platform to continue this work.
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    Time and Sovereignty in the Neoliberal Hegemony
    HASSAN, R ; Huebener, P (Routledge, 2017)
    This edited volume focuses on the intersection of time and globalization, as manifested across a variety of economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts.
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    The worldly space: the digital university in network time
    Hassan, R (Informa UK Limited, 2017-01-02)
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    Philosophy of Media A Short History of Ideas and Innovations from Socrates to Social Media
    Hassan, R ; Sutherland, T (Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2017)
    In Philosophy of Media, Hassan and Sutherland explore the philosophical and technological trajectory of media from Classical Greece until today, casting a new and revealing light upon the global media condition.
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    When Innovation Becomes Conformist
    HASSAN, R ; Paul Gibbs, ; Barnett,, R (Routledge, 2015-11-27)
    UNIVERSITIES. IN. THE. FLUX. OF. TIME. Higher education and the institution of the university exist in time, their essential nature now continually subject to change; change in students, in knowledge, in structure and in their own communities.
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    The Function of Time in Marcuse's One-Dimensional World
    Hassan, R (New Proposals Publishing Society, 2015)
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