Media ownership and its concentration in a few powerful hands have been on the European political agenda since the 1980s. To date, no coherent and effective control mechanism has been put in place. Instead, and despite repeated calls from the European Parliament for strong rules to control media ownership, recent policy activity in this area has sidelined the problem of media ownership concentration and focused on ownership transparency. This focus risks absorbing transformative energy at the expense of progress in limiting the power and dominance of transnational media and communication conglomerates. As a minimum requirement, European regulatory mechanisms should impose obligations for greater internal editorial freedom as media ownership concentration increases.

The essay considers the relationship of the US empire to torture as a practice and an aspect of entertainment. Focusing on depictions of torture in film and television after 9/11, the article also looks back to the nineteenth century to show how torture functioned as a type of entertainment in an earlier historical context. Lazo argues that the use of torture in popular culture amounts to a type of “torturetainment” meant to entice the audience with its spectacle of violence. Through these forms of torturetainment, US cultural producers recognize, critique and flaunt the US willingness to use torture as a tactic to support its imperial ambitions while also masking the operations of empire through a focus on alternate narratives related to the goals of protagonists. These cultural representations thus reveal torture as part of the arsenal of empire and a discursive framing related to social conditions within a national polis. The chapter examines the film Zero, Dark Thirty (2012) and a dime novel from 1851 to emphasize the longue durée of torture as entertainment within the context of the US empire.

Linking worldview and geographical spaces, this chapter links place, aesthetic development, and ideological changes in the work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. From the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, bebop, and rhythm & blues of his home town, Newark, through his years in the (largely) white, avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village and his transitional plunge into Harlem’s Cultural Nationalist milieu, to his long final activism as Newark’s pre-eminent Marxist-Leninist poet, Baraka became one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Throughout these changes, Baraka’s poetry, with its evolving combination of Black vernacular speech, avant-garde technique, and political acuity, profoundly influenced Black American poetry and, in the process, the nature of contemporary American poetry itself.

In this chapter, we are interested in specific examples of symbols. We already met some. For each of them, we shall sum up here their properties, even if the proofs or results appear later in this book.

Chapter 2 has three main sections. First it draws on the philosophy of technology literature, more specifically post-phenomenology, to interrogate the meaning of human–technology relations. Can visitors to a website be considered users of machine translation even if they are unaware that a machine translation tool is in use? What is the meaning of ‘use’ exactly? When a police officer uses machine translation to speak to a driver, what type of relationship does the driver have with the machine translation tool? These are some of the questions initially addressed in this chapter. The chapter then examines technologies’ influencing properties. Convenience is persuasive and machine translation tools are designed to be convenient. They reflect specific social and economic values which research on their use needs to consider. Lastly, the chapter discusses the complex decision-making that uses of machine translation call for in the sectors under analysis. A case is made for the notion of virtue as an apt framework for engaging with the dilemmas posed by risky but potentially beneficial uses of machine translation.