John Shiga

From the sinking of the RMS Titanic to contemporary ocean surveillance infrastructures currently used by the United States Navy, this chapter explores the manner in which sonar shaped, and was shaped by, an array of military and industrial uses of subsurface space in the twentieth century. Sonar, the chapter argues, contributed to the current eco-catastrophe by inundating the ocean with noise and by facilitating the expansion of military and industrial activities and infrastructures in ocean space. The chapter suggests that a more sustainable model of underwater sound can be derived from proto-sonar technologies based on nonelectric techniques and human listening labor.

Background: Given the escalating anti-Asian racism and xenophobia caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this Research in Brief presents a rapid review of relevant research published between March 2020 and February 2022 in cultural studies and communication journals. Analysis: The data collection identified only 13 articles published by the target journals, indicating the marginal status of communication and media studies in the expanding body of research on anti-Asian racism. Further qualitative thematic analysis of the 13 articles revealed their analytical emphasis on anti-Asian discourse and rhetoric online. Meanwhile, the structural factors underlying the reproduction of systemic racism remain underexplored. Conclusion and implications: Based on this rapid review, it is recommended that future research pay more attention to how racial tension and discrimination are woven into everyday communications across a range of media including social media, traditional media, and interpersonal communication. There is also an urgent need for communication scholars to develop intersectional lenses that facilitate the critical analysis of macro factors (class, gender, geopolitics, etc.) that contribute to the reproduction of racial hierarchy in Canada and other settler states.

  Throughout the Cold War, the US Navy aggressively explored the sound-making and sound-detecting capacities of cetaceans to help it retain its supremacy in marine battle space. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises were engaged as animals that “see with sound,” that produce sophisticated echolocation “clicks,” and that harness the ocean’s complex acoustic waveguide to detect signals thousands of miles away. Other scholars have touched on the navy’s legacy in cetology (whale science), but none have made it their object of study. Our article places this relationship at the center of burgeoning engagements among media studies, sound studies, and marine spatial theory. We focus on the Cold War period, when new interests in submarine warfare facilitated the growth of naval interests in cetology. We understand the dynamic outcomes of these interests in terms of acoustemology—Steven Feld’s concept for a theory of what can be known and experienced through situated sonic encounter. At stake in th...

Background: Given the escalating anti-Asian racism and xenophobia caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this research in brief presents a rapid review of relevant research published between March 2020 and February 2022 in cultural studies and communication journals. Analysis: The data collection identified only 13 articles published by the target journals, indicating the marginal status of communication and media studies in the expanding body of research on anti-Asian racism. Further qualitative thematic analysis of the 13 articles revealed their analytical emphasis on anti-Asian discourse and rhetoric online. Meanwhile, the structural factors underlying the reproduction of systemic racism remain underexplored. Conclusion and implications: Based on this rapid review, it is recommended that future research pay more attention to how racial tension and discrimination are woven into everyday communications across a range of media including social media, traditional media, and interpersonal c...

From the sinking of the RMS Titanic to contemporary ocean surveillance infrastructures currently used by the United States Navy, this chapter explores the manner in which sonar shaped, and was shaped by, an array of military and industrial uses of subsurface space in the twentieth century. Sonar, the chapter argues, contributed to the current eco-catastrophe by inundating the ocean with noise and by facilitating the expansion of military and industrial activities and infrastructures in ocean space. The chapter suggests that a more sustainable model of underwater sound can be derived from proto-sonar technologies based on nonelectric techniques and human listening labor.

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of peop...

This article traces the development of acoustic navigation media, or “sonar,” in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the relationships forged between underwater sound, electric media, and new techniques of listening. The central argument is that sonar shaped, and was shaped by, the expansion of warfare and capital underwater, and that this expansion came to be conceptualized by nautical organizations as dependent upon the control of underwater sound. Through analysis of key episodes in the conquest of subsea space, the author explores scientific, military, and commercial efforts to sense underwater objects and demonstrates how these efforts helped reconceptualize oceanic water as a component of undersea acoustic media and led to the material reorganization of the ocean’s acoustic field. Cet article retrace le développement de médias acoustiques de navigation ou <> dans la première moitié du vingtième siècle en mettant l’accent sur les rapports créés entre les ...

In an age of technology, screens are all around us and hold great power in the shaping of public opinion and thought. The United States of America is the largest film industry in the world in terms of global box office revenue. Statistics show that in 2018, the United States had a gross box office revenue of 11.08 billion US dollars making it the leading film market in the world (Watson, 2019). American cinema has a strong influence on society’s notion of identity and what is accepted as the norm. This major research paper (MRP) uses a critical analysis of popular romantic comedies and coming of age films over the past four decades to explore the portrayal of masculinity as represented in Asian male characters within American cinema. Through the analysis of the films Sixteen Candles (1984), Joy Luck Club (1993), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018), I explore the traditional representation of hegemonic masculinity, the common elements of dominant portrayals of Asian men in American cinema, ...

This article traces the development of acoustic navigation media, or “sonar,” in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the relationships forged between underwater sound, electric media, and new techniques of listening. The central argument is that sonar shaped, and was shaped by, the expansion of warfare and capital underwater, and that this expansion came to be conceptualized by nautical organizations as dependent upon the control of underwater sound. Through analysis of key episodes in the conquest of subsea space, the author explores scientific, military, and commercial efforts to sense underwater objects and demonstrates how these efforts helped reconceptualize oceanic water as a component of undersea acoustic media and led to the material reorganization of the ocean’s acoustic field.Cet article retrace le développement de médias acoustiques de navigation ou « sonars » dans la première moitié du vingtième siècle en mettant l’accent sur les rapports créés entre les...

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium” - the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

This paper explores the relationship between mp3 and the new techniques of copy control. Mp3 has become an icon of consumer control over content since the format is often used to bypass traditional systems of distribution and ownership. In contrast, copy control techniques are commonly derided as unjustified restrictions on technical and cultural innovation. I argue here that both mp3 and digital rights management (DRM) indicate a broader shift in efforts to control online conduct from moral and rational persuasion to socio-technical configuration. In the first part of this paper, I discuss the concepts of translation and immutable mobility in actor-network theory. There are important overlaps between ANT and Harold Innis’s theory of media and power. However, ANT avoids the pitfalls of technological determinism by focusing on the strategies through which diverse materials, representations, and claims are “black-boxed” in technological design. My case study technical innovation focuses the ways in which engineers and firms attempt to represent the diverse entities including copyrights, digital networks, Internet users, and models of human hearing, and delegate roles to these diverse entities in the design of mp3 and DRM. I retrace the strategies of regulatory organizations in their attempt make the reproduction of digital artifacts more predictable. The sequence of regulatory techniques from public relations and litigation to programming follows a broader pattern identified in actor-network literature from provisional ties established through signs to durable ties formed through the socialization of things. Copy protection systems can be understood as part of the general process of involving and activating the nonhuman in social life. Media studies needs a concept of agency which encompasses the nonhuman in order to account for Apple’s dominance and for the broader realignment of social regulation with technological innovation.

This essay traces the logic of mash-up culture, an online music scene in which practitioners use audio-editing software to splice and combine pop songs encoded in MP3 format to produce hybrid or ''mashed-up'' recordings. The study focuses on the logic that guides the development of works, styles and reputations in mash-up culture. Several fields of practice shape this cultural logic, including ''virtual studios,'' online message boards, dance clubs, and the market for ''underground'' and ''unofficial'' remixes. This cultural logic generates a new kind of amateur musicianship based on pluralistic listening and the reorganization of the relations that constitute musical recordings.

iPods, MP3s and file-sharing networks perform a series of actions that are often reserved for human agents, such as the intellectual and taste-driven labor involved in selecting, sequencing, and rediscovering forgotten sound recordings. At the same time, the familiar understanding of artifacts as stable, material, objective things ‘‘out there’’ is also being eroded by the infinite replicability, malleability, and ephemeral flickering of things online. These trends lead to questions regarding the ontological status of artifacts and reopen the question of how to distinguish technical and material artifacts from human and social relations. In this article, the author explores actor-network theory’s (ANT) concept of translation, which advances an alternative framework for understanding the role of artifacts in everyday life.

From the sinking of the RMS Titanic to contemporary ocean surveillance infrastructures currently used by the United States Navy, this chapter explores the manner in which sonar shaped, and was shaped by, an array of military and industrial uses of subsurface space in the twentieth century. Sonar, the chapter argues, contributed to the current eco-catastrophe by inundating the ocean with noise and by facilitating the expansion of military and industrial activities and infrastructures in ocean space. The chapter suggests that a more sustainable model of underwater sound can be derived from proto-sonar technologies based on nonelectric techniques and human listening labor.