Conceiving Virtuality From Art To Technology

This book provides new theoretical approaches to the subject of virtuality. All chapters reflect the importance of extending the analysis of the concept of “the virtual” to areas of knowledge that, until today, have not been fully included in its philosophical foundations. The respective chapters share new insights on art, media, psychic systems and technology, while also presenting new ways of articulating the concept of the virtual with regard to the main premises of Western thought. Given its thematic scope, this book is intended not only for a philosophical audience, but also for all scientists who have turned to the humanities in search of answers to their questions.

The digital age we now live in is fundamentally changing how we relate to our perceptions and images. Daniel O'Shiel provides the first comprehensive phenomenology of virtual technology in order to show how the previously well-established experiential lines and structures between three basic categories of phenomenal experience – our everyday perceptions of reality; our everyday fantasies of irreality; and our everyday engagements with external images, not least digital ones – are becoming blurred, inverted or are even collapsing in a new era where a specific type of virtuality is coming to the fore. O'Shiel examines in depth just what this means for the phenomenology behind it, as well as the concrete practical consequences going forward. The work is divided into two main parts. In the first O'Shiel fully investigates the phenomenological natures of perception and imagination through close textual analyses of the relevant works by Edmund Husserl, Eugen Fink and Jean-Paul Sartre. In each phenomenologist perception and imagination are ultimately seen as different in kind, although the dividing line differs, especially with reference to a middle category of 'image-consciousness' (Bildbewusstsein). This first part argues for basic phenomenological differences between perceptions; physical and external images; and more mental imagery, while also allowing for a more general gradation between them. The second part then applies these theoretical findings to some of the most influential 'virtual technologies' today – social media; online gaming; and some virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies – in order to show how previously clear categories of real and irreal, present and absent, genuine and fake, and even true and false, are becoming less so.

Teaching and Mobile Learning: Interactive Educational Design is a groundbreaking book which shows how to design innovative educational mobile learning environments to instructional designers, curriculum developers, and learning professionals. The book aims to solicit teachers, educators, and practitioners to adapt their teaching with the help of educational digital models related to mobile technologies. Mobile learning is a revolution in concepts like space, sound production, and learning to get more and more customized in always-connected and ever-changing educational mobile learning environments. Researchers and academicians can be trained in cognition processes in learning management of mixed reality and virtual bodies. Mixed reality mobile technologies are becoming tools for education and training in mixed reality mobile learning. Readers of this book will understand how user and device innovative interactions are borderline with attention deficit disorder, digital amnesia, and information overload. The book develops educational knowledge on how to manage mobile technology and specific learning disorders to monitor the use of smartphones and technology tools and to empower their role in learning enhancement processes.

The Quantification of Bodies in Health aims to deepen understanding of the quantification of the body and of the role of self-tracking practices in everyday life. It brings together authors working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and digital culture.

This book is about communication, a universal, yet particular, form of linking people and ideas. It details the growing and multiform uses, functions, interactions, and effects of communication in the contemporary “world-society”, and highlights the dialectic between society and communication. It will also serve to stimulate critical thinking. The book is structured as a compendium of the sociology of communication, providing a practical and pedagogical-didactic resource especially for students, including case studies, summary-tables, questions for review, and excerpts from selected works and authors. This book is a major contribution to cultural, media, and digital studies, and will be of interest to those who live in an increasingly digital, technological, and global society, and want to understand a phenomenon as social as it is inevitable, spontaneous, and influential.

Pragmatism—a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and embodied cognitive science—is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists reject as too narrow. Matthew Crippen, a philosopher of mind, and Jay Schulkin, a behavioral neuroscientist, offer an innovative interdisciplinary theory of mind. They argue that pragmatism in combination with phenomenology is not only able to give an unusually persuasive rendering of how we think, feel, experience, and act in the world but also provides the account most consistent with current evidence from cognitive science and neurobiology. Crippen and Schulkin contend that cognition, emotion, and perception are incomplete without action, and in action they fuse together. Not only are we embodied subjects whose thoughts, emotions, and capacities comprise one integrated system; we are living ecologies inseparable from our surroundings, our cultures, and our world. Ranging from social coordination to the role of gut bacteria and visceral organs in mental activity, and touching upon fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and plant cognition, Crippen and Schulkin stress the role of aesthetics, emotions, interests, and moods in the ongoing enactment of experience. Synthesizing philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, and the history of science, Mind Ecologies offers a broad and deep exploration of evidence for the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of mind.

Distinctive and unique in its approach, this book opens up art education to the broader field of social enquiry into practice, subjectivity and identity. It draws upon important developments in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences and applies this to the professional field of art in education. It opens new perspectives for teachers, teacher educators and student teachers.