As the online and the offline world become increasingly intertwined the different concepts of social interaction have to be revisited in order to understand differences and similarities. This paper examines different concepts from the utopian view of the virtual community to the commodification of social relations in Wittel’s notion of network sociality. The purpose is to reveal the underlying ...

In this paper, an economic study of different levels of expected privacy, both individual and collective, is used to demonstrate that we live neither in a dystopian control society nor in a utopian privacy enhanced society, but rather in a noise society characterized by high collective expectations of privacy and low individual expectations of privacy. This has profound consequences for the des...

This study examines three literary utopias from the margins of German literature, namely German-language literature Eastern Moravia. The works chosen for analysis are dramatic cycle City People (Die Stadt der Menschen) by Moravian-born Austrian writer and visionary Susanne Schmida (1894–1981), novel Imperial Kaiserstadt) diplomat Paul Zifferer (1879–1929), text “The Future” (“Die des Kommenden”...

This Article demonstrates the overlooked contribution of the ancient Near East to the development of constitutional law. The legal corpus of Deuteronomy provides a utopian model for the organization of the state, one that enshrines separation of powers and their systematic subordination to a public legal text—the “Torah”—that delineates their jurisdiction while also ensuring their autonomy. Thi...

How does one start an avant-garde movement? First one needs a group of people ready to subsume their differences in the name of a common cause. Second, this cause must aspire to a fundamental, revolutionary change, a new departure, a utopian promise. And third, the new movement must be inaugurated in some form of public event and through the distribution of a collective statement, usually writt...