Minority Report Billboard Scene

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Playboy as an example of Pornification - Discuss

Students might like like to read the two previous postings about Playboy (via The Conversation). They will you to understand just how popular such magazines once were, and how internetworked digital technology, made them largely irrelevant. The issue of "pornification" as mentioned in the lecture is something (implicitly) raised here and is a key interest of one of the article authors ( Gail Dines ). Regards from, Phil
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Why your father's Playboy can't compete in today's world of hard-core porn

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Why your father's Playboy can't compete in today's world of hard-core porn Gail Dines , Wheelock College and David L Levy , University of Massachusetts Boston Last week Playboy offered the latest example of how much times are changing in the digital age. The pioneer of soft-core porn announced that it is no longer going to publish images of naked women, beginning in March. Before we all celebrate this as a feminist victory, we need to ask why Playboy has now decided to rebrand itself as a lifestyle magazine for young men, much like Vice and FHM, or, put another way, Cosmopolitan for men. Playboy successfully launched porn as a viable mainstream industry, but ironically, it is now a victim of the competition it spawned. The industry has evolved from soft-core magazines to hard-core internet platforms, and Playboy’s old advertising-based business model became obsolete. Playboy simply cannot compete in the world of contemporary porn because its pin-up style pictures
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Asimov's Laws of Robotics aren't the moral guidelines they appear to be

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Asimov's Laws of Robotics aren't the moral guidelines they appear to be Tithe Luadthong/Shutterstock Tom Sorell , University of Warwick Seventy-five years ago, the celebrated science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround . Set on Mercury, it features a sophisticated robot nicknamed Speedy that has been ordered to gather some of the chemical selenium for two human space adventurers. Speedy gets near the selenium, but a toxic gas threatens to destroy the robot. When it retreats from the gas to save itself, the threat recedes and it feels obliged to go back for the selenium. It is left going round in circles. Speedy is caught in a conflict between two of the laws that robots in Asimov’s stories follow as their core ethical programming: always obey human instructions and always protect your existence (as long as it doesn’t result in human injury). Speedy’s custodians resolve the robot’s conflict
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