The main aim of the article was to present two emerging discourses of contemporary historiography in the field of digital media. In the first example, the authors present the thought of Niels Brügger, called the Web History and Web-minded historiography, which concentrates upon the digital source itself. The other school is marked by the works of Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, and called media archaeology. It underlines the concept of the medium itself as a primary object of research.
In the article, the authors propose a typology of political knowledge from online learning activities and test its validity in an empirical qualitative study. The essence of their proposal is that meaningful study of the process of acquiring knowledge (rational analysis of factors modifying attitudes) must take into account both the perspective of the citizen (the demand for information) and an analysis of the publicly available knowledge (the supply of information). The authors distinguish three main methods of acquiring information: heuristic, reflective, and by-product learning. They note the importance of generational factors in shaping the cognitive activity of Internet users. There has been a gradual increase in the importance of source management, with simultaneous alienation and skepticism towards information obtained on the Internet. While the authors’ analysis is restricted to the Internet, their approach is not reductionist in that they consider the internet to be a medium for traditional media and its influence on civic attitudes.
The article presents a particular mechanism of political decision making in contemporary democratic systems. It is called here ‘ad hoc democracy’. This notion refers to the phenomenon of making political decisions (that are general and abstract) on the basis of premises that are individual and situational. After defining ad hoc democracy, the author reconstructs a typical scenario of the phenomenon, demonstrates selected examples of ad hoc democracy and discusses its main consequences. The analysis of ad hoc democracy construction process follows. The main cause of ad hoc democracy is defined as the interference of internally inconsistent logic of actions taken by three types of actors in political sphere: media, society (treated as an audience) and political decision-makers. In the last part of the article it is hypothesized that the systems experiencing rapid social changes and democratization processes are particularly prone to the emergence of ad hoc democracy. The hypothesis is justifi ed and substantiated by referring to an example of Poland during the systemic transformation process.
Confronted with a natural tendency of marginalization national/ethnic minorities and immigrant communities respond by adopting two diverse strategies of showing their presence in the public sphere of the host country. Depending on the level of their integration and the goals they want to achieve, they can either stress their links (affinity) with the majority culture or the differences that mark them out. However, some minority communities succeed in achieving a distinctive presence in the public sphere already at the stage of launching its own media.
Research on participation of social media users has contributed to our understanding of modern citizenship, civic engagement, and contemporary public sphere. Despite a growing interest in participatory practices in social media little is known about the factors affecting political participation of social media users. Based on an online survey of 700 social media users in Poland, this study examines the relationship between social capital (defined at the individual level as a resource embedded in personal networks) and political participation. It has been established that there is a contradictory relationship between social capital and participatory activities of social media users. Apparently, differences between the resources that are only embedded in personal networks on the one hand, and those that can be mobilized for purposive actions on the other, matter when association between social capital and political participation is considered. Moreover, the presence of these resources significantly varies across different types of social relations (family, friends and acquaintances) of respondents engaged in different participatory actions.
Heat flow in heterogeneous media with complex microstructure follows tortuous path and therefore determination of temperature distribution in them is a challenging task. Two-scales, micro-macro model of heat conduction with phase change in such media was considered in the paper. A relation between temperature distribution on the microscopic level, i.e., on the level of details of microstructure, and the temperature distribution on the macroscopic level, i.e., on the level where the properties were homogenized and treated as effective, was derived. The expansion applied to this relation allowed to obtain its more simplified, approximate form corresponding to separation of micro- and macro-scales. Then the validity of this model was checked by performing calculations for 2D microstructure of a composite made of two constituents. The range of application of the proposed micro-macro model was considered in transient states of heat conduction both for the case when the phase change in the material is present and when it is absent. Variation of the effective thermal conductivity with time was considered and a criterion was found for which application of the considered model is justified.
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