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A guide to the nature, purpose, and place of public service television within a multi-platform, multichannel ecology. Television is on the verge of both decline and rebirth. Vast technological change has brought about financial uncertainty as well as new creative possibilities for producers, distributors, and viewers. This book examines not only the unexpected resilience of TV as a cultural pastime and aesthetic practice but also the prospects for public service television in a digital, multichannel ecology. The proliferation of platforms from Amazon and Netflix to YouTube and the vlogosphere means intense competition for audiences traditionally dominated by legacy broadcasters. Public service broadcasters — whether the BBC, the German ARD, or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — are particularly vulnerable to this volatility. Born in the more stable political and cultural conditions of the twentieth century, they face a range of pressures on their revenue, their remits, and indeed their very futures. This book reflects on the issues raised in Lord Puttnam's 2016 Public Service TV Inquiry Report. With resonance for students, professionals, and consumers with a stake in British media, it serves both as a historical record and as a look at the future of television in an on-demand age.

This book presents an innovative new approach to the study of wellbeing, intersecting psychology, linguistics, and cross-cultural scholarship. It begins by introducing a cartographic theory of language, proposing that words enable us to map our world, and thus to understand and navigate our lives. However, different cultures map the world in different ways, generating so-called untranslatable words (i.e., which lack an equivalent in another language – in this case, English). Their significance is that they point to aspects of life that have hitherto been overlooked or undervalued in English-speaking cultures. By exploring such words, we can therefore refine our maps, developing a more nuanced appreciation of the world. This book deploys this process with respect to wellbeing specifically, bringing its hidden dimensions to light. Moreover, it argues that this process may not only enhance our understanding of wellbeing, but also our experience of it, empowering us to identify phenomena that had previously been only dimly perceived, and even to discover new dimensions of existence we had not realised were there. These possibilities are brought to life through a tour of 400 or so words, sourced from nearly 80 languages. These terms are analysed thematically, arranged into three overarching meta-categories – feelings, relationships, and personal development – which together constitute a comprehensive new theory of wellbeing. The book concludes by outlining an ambitious research agenda that will fully allow the promise of these untranslatable words, and the theory outlined here, to be realised.

This book charts a journey that ranges from poems of chivalry to philosophy, from Yvain to Hegel, from Beatrice to Heidegger. An ancient legend identifies Demon, Chance, Love, and Necessity as the four gods who preside over the birth of every human being. We must all pay tribute to these deities and should not try to elude or dupe them. To accept them, the book suggests, is to live one's life as an adventure—not in the trivial sense of the term, with lightness and disenchantment, but with the understanding that adventure, as a specific way of being, is the most profound experience in our human existence. The four gods of legend are joined at the end by a goddess, the most elusive and mysterious of all: Elpis, Hope. In Greek mythology, Hope remains in Pandora's box, not because it postpones its fulfillment to an invisible beyond but because somehow it has always been already satisfied. Here, the book presents Hope as the ultimate gift of the human adventure on Earth.

How can we be aware of ourselves both as physical objects and as thinking, experiencing subjects? What role does the experience of the body play in generating our sense of self? What is the role of action and agency in the construction of the bodily self? These questions have been a rich subject of interdisciplinary debate among philosophers, neuroscientists, experimental psychologists, and cognitive scientists for several decades. José Luis Bermúdez been a significant contributor to these debates since the 1990’s, when he authored The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 1998) and co-edited The Body and the Self (MIT Press, 1995) with Anthony Marcel and Naomi Eilan. The Bodily Self is a selection of essays all focused on different aspects of the role of the body in self-consciousness, prefaced by a substantial introduction outlining common themes across the essays. The essays have been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes. Putting them together brings out a wide-ranging, thematically consistent perspective on a set of topics and problems that remain firmly of interest across the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

It is now widely accepted that many organisms (including humans) don’t just react to the world using behavioral reflexes, but also, at times, decide what to do by relying on mental representations. More specifically, the behavior of many organisms is not simply triggered by a perception of the state of their environment, but inferred using higher-level mental states downstream from their perceptual states. What is far less clear is why this is the case: what benefits does representational decision making bring to an organism, and what implications do these benefits have for the exact role that mental representations play in an organism’s decision making machinery? In my book, I provide answers to these questions. Specifically, I defend a cognitive-efficiency-based account of the evolution of mental representations, according to which a key driver of the evolution of representational decision making is the fact that mental representations can enable an organism to save a number of cognitive resources and to adjust more easily to changed environments. I then apply this account to a number of open questions in different sciences, including: when should we expect cognition to essentially involve parts of the environment? When should we expect decision making to rely on simple, satisficing heuristics? When should we expect organisms to be altruistically motivated to help others? Along the way, I also respond to concerns about the plausibility of evolutionary psychological projects more generally.

Computing is increasingly intertwined with our physical world. From smart watches to connected cars, to the Internet of Things and 3D-printing, the trend towards combining digital and analogue materials in design is no longer an exception, but a hallmark for where interaction design is going in general. Computational processing increasingly involves physical materials, computing is increasingly manifested and expressed in physical form, and interaction with these new forms of computing is increasingly mediated via physical materials. Interaction Design is therefore increasingly a material concern. In this book, “The Materiality of Interaction – Notes on the Materials of Interaction Design”, Mikael Wiberg investigates this trend towards material interactions. In doing so he describes how the field of human-computer interaction has moved, through the material turn, from a representation-driven design paradigm, towards a paradigm which he calls material-centered interaction design. Wiberg examines what this emergent paradigm implies for the practice of doing interaction design, he proposes a design method for doing material-centered interaction design, and he discusses the implications for moving forward given an interaction design paradigm that focuses on the materiality of interaction.

How should we think about authorship, use and piracy in an era of media convergence? How does the growing focus on amateur creativity impact on existing legal and cultural understandings of around creation? And why are the author, user and pirate so prominent in debates around copyright law? Authors, Users, Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity presents a new way of thinking about these three central subjects of copyright. It outlines a relational approach to subjectivity, charting connections between the author, user and pirate through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, moving from early regulatory debates around radio spectrum and nineteenth century cases on book abridgments to the controversial reuse of Instagram photos and the emergence of multi-channel networks on YouTube. The book draws on legal scholarship, cultural theory and media studies research to provide a new way of thinking about subjectivity and copyright. It also offers insights into a range of critical issues that sit at the intersection of copyright law and digital media including online copyright infringement, amateur media production and the potential futures of creative industries.

Video games have a bad reputation in the mainstream media. They are blamed for encouraging social isolation, promoting violence, and creating tensions between parents and children. In this book, Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee offer another view. They show that video games can be a tool for connection, not isolation, creating opportunities for families to communicate and learn together. Siyahhan and Gee offer examples of how video games, like smartphones, Skype, and social media, help families stay connected. Further, they describe how families express their feelings and share their experiences and understanding of the world through playing video games like Sims, Civilization, and Minecraft. When designed intentionally to support families, video games can also create conversations around such real-world issues and sensitive topics as bullying and peer pressure. Siyahhan and Gee draw on a decade of research to look at how learning and teaching take place when families play video games together. With video games, they argue, the parents are not necessarily the teachers and experts; all family members can be both teachers and learners. They suggest video games can help families form, develop, and sustain their learning culture as well as develop skills that are valued in the twenty-first century workplace. Finally, Siyahhan and Gee share recommendations for educators and game designers who are interested in supporting intergenerational play around video games.

In a post-truth, fake news world, we are particularly susceptible to the claims of pseudoscience. When emotions and opinions are more widely disseminated than scientific findings, and self-proclaimed experts get their expertise from Google, how can the average person distinguish real science from fake? This book examines pseudoscience from a variety of perspectives, through case studies, analysis, and personal accounts that show how to recognize pseudoscience, why it is so widely accepted, and how to advocate for real science. Contributors examine the basics of pseudoscience, including issues of cognitive bias; the costs of pseudoscience, with accounts of naturopathy and logical fallacies in the anti-vaccination movement; perceptions of scientific soundness; the mainstream presence of “integrative medicine,” hypnosis, and parapsychology; and the use of case studies and new media in science advocacy.

A linguistic/cognitive system of “targeting” is proposed that unifies the traditionally distinct domains of anaphora and deixis. As a speaker communicates with a hearer, her attention can come to be on something in the environment — her “target” — that she wants the hearer's attention to be on as well at a certain point in her discourse. This target can be located near or far in either the speech-internal (anaphoric) or the speech-external (deictic) environment. At her selected discourse point, she places a “trigger” — one of a special set of mainly closed-class forms (e.g., English this, that, here, there, now, then). This trigger directs the hearer to perform a certain three-stage procedure. In the first stage, he seeks all available “cues” to the target. Such cues belong to ten different categories representing ten distinct sources of information. In the second stage, he combines the cues he has determined so as to narrow down to the speaker's intended target. In the third stage, he maps the concept of the target he has determined back onto the trigger and integrates it into the overall conception expressed by the sentence. A trigger is lexicalized to occur in a particular interaction between the speaker and hearer. This interaction incrementally leads to their joint attention on the target. In a special process of constructive discrepancy, the speaker can introduce conflicting cues that lead the hearer to resolve the conflict and find the intended target.