Although recurrent respiratory papillomatosis is a benign disease of the upper aerodigestive tract caused by infection with human papillomavirus, the disease process is unpredictable, ranging from mild disease and spontaneous remission to an aggressive disease with pulmonary spread and requirement for frequent surgical debulking procedures. It can present a protracted clinical course and cause potentially life-threatening compromise of the airways. Over recent decades, a number of alternative medical therapies to standard surgical treatment have been investigated, with modest outcomes overall. Currently, some additional therapies are being explored, together with novel surgical instrumentation that can help to avoid inevitable long-term stenotic complications, ultimately affecting quality of life. Hopefully, clinicians might soon be able to significantly improve the quality of treatment and outcomes for patients affected with recurrent respiratory papillomatosis, with human papillomavirus vaccination having a potentially important role.
In this essay, three recently published books are reviewed: Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, by Jonathan Sterne, Failure, by Neta Alexander and Arjun Appadurai, and In Case of Emergency, by Elizabeth Ellcessor. The essay argues that these three works contribute to the debate about media and disability by proposing a non ableist perspective – that is a perspective which doesn’t consider ability as a normative assumption – which affects both media theory and media practices. In this regard, the essay identifies three keywords which are potentially game changers in media studies: impairment, failure, emergency. Emphasizing the ‘normal’, ‘banal’ or ‘habitual’ character of these terms, the books here reviewed show how these keywords may enable us to go beyond the traditional idea of media as prostheses, and call for a different approach toward media and media studies: one which does not metaphorize disability but understands media as part of the sociocultural, political and economic context where a certain idea of ability and disability is both defined and materially enacted. An approach, therefore, that aims to deconstruct that idea.
This article deals with the groundbreaking phenomenon of AI voice, highlighting two possible meanings that are often not problematized: the voice embedded into AI-based devices and the voice created using AI algorithms. In order to clarify the distinctions and the intersections of these two meanings, the article uses an approach inspired by media archaeology and social constructionism. It argues that AI voice as a social phenomenon is constructed by the interaction of a discursive level of representations and a non-discursive level of material practices and operations. The interaction of these two levels results in a tension between anthropocentrism and posthumanism, which is a characteristic of AI voice. Such tension is investigated through two case studies: the commercial of the smart speaker Amazon Alexa and the phenomenon of ‘voice cloning’. While the first is an example of how at a discursive level the ‘voice in the machine’ is represented as a way to ‘personify’ AI technology, the second, which consists in the possibility of reproducing the features of an embodied and personal voice, is an example of how the materialization of that cultural idea depends on the technical possibilities and material practices required by data-driven algorithms.
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