Islam and the Environment – Ethics and Practice an Assessment

Mobile Intimacy

Knowledge and ability represent the crucial requirements for an individual nowadays. Knowledgeable people find it easier to solve problems and overcome difficult situations. Knowledge is a valuable commodity in the modern world which, if updated regularly, never goes out of style or significance. The paper explores the concept of competitiveness of knowledge in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and how it impacts an individual's social and economic standing. As a result of the revolution, which is brought about by the development of digital and nanotechnology as well as artificial intelligence that permeates every aspect of a social being, new roles are imposed on individuals. The knowledge and skills that people should possess in today's world are discussed, along with how they relate to technology advancements. Learning is the potential energy of a person capable of accepting rational needs as motivations and transforming them into actions through activity. Since everyone has a unique personality and learning is an individual act, everyone acquires knowledge in their own way. Learning occurs continuously throughout life, connects to all human endeavors, validates an individual's resolve, and enables the selection of a value system and way of life. Throughout history, learning needs have changed, grown, and been greatly impacted by the social environment. The intersection of various learner characteristics with the situations that shape an individual's life and interests is known as the culture of learning. To address problems with content presentation and learning style, an individual can shift from one form and method of learning to another, as well as from one location to another. We are discussing various learning patterns that point to the most successful, advantageous, and adaptable learning ranges. They represent the state of knowledge in the most significant spheres of life and action at any given time. They line up with societal norms. However, learning varies not only among individuals but also among societies, cultures, and civilizations. Science, education, learning, and knowledge are the most reliable foundations for the future. Changes that are more profound than any other in human history have resulted from the abrupt leap in social development and the evolution of the Third to the Fourth Industrial Revolutions. Thanks to digital media and the Internet, society is becoming a "global village" where information can be accessed in a split second. A person is exposed to a large amount of information every day and their working environment is ever-changing. Man is compelled to adjust to the new environment as modern means assume his roles. Being open to change and improvement throughout one's life is one of the best ways to stay competitive in the labor and knowledge markets, if not the only one. Lifelong learning and being open to change and improvement are two, if not the only, ways that an individual can stay competitive in the labor and knowledge markets. Gone are the days when a person began and ended his career at the same place of employment. The imperatives of the modern era are the knowledge society and the learning society. They include the entire vertical of the educational system, the economy, and all social and economic structures. A society that prioritizes lifelong learning, makes learning content available, provides conditions for learning, and supports the individual to balance work and learning is essential in the modern world. To prepare today's students for the workforce of the future and the society they will inhabit, it is imperative that the current educational systems be updated. This shift necessitates modifying the learning content to include the human and technical skills required to create inclusive, growing economies. To enable the creation of a comprehensive education system, significant changes can only take place if there is collaboration among education ministries, educators, and the private sector.

The problem of freedom of speech caught the attention of thinkers from the very beginning of our civilization, but it was only in the modern age that it became a central issue both in theoretical philosophy and in social practices. Freedom of speech is not only a matter of the individual’s private rights but also one of the fundamental conditions for the proper functioning of the public sphere. The space of mutual communication has gone through extremely dynamic changes in the last decades —we live in the proverbial “global village”, where the possibilities seem unlimited. However, parallel to these possibilities, extremely real threats appear. The aim of my paper is the presentation of the idea of freedom of speech in traditional understanding and describing new challenges. The question arises: to what extent can traditional values be transferred into a new “digital reality”?

The beginning of the 21st century is an important juncture in mankind's history when rapid transformations in all areas of human life are taking place in almost every corner of entire globe. People speak of borderless world (Ohmae, 1990), (Details not mentioned in the reference) where geographical and political boundaries are indistinct by information and technology. It is said that we are living in a global village, where communication systems are faster and more efficient. The process of globalization has recently and rapidly caused many changes and transformation in various fields and sectors such as economics, education, politics, technology, culture and social structure and so forth. Although it brings about structural changes within the nation states by affecting the basic fundamentals governing human relations, social organizations and world views with advantages and opportunities for the developed and powerful countries.

The characteristics or problems of the human and society are revealed by local, so-called vernacular, architecture. Different economic, social, political, cultural, and climatic conditions in different areas have led to the development of construction practices that are specific to that area, culture, and ethnic group. These conditions have never been static, but industrialisation, modernisation, and globalisation have caused the strongest and most rapid weakening of architectural traditions, alignment of cultures, and the disappearance of local peculiarities, which had been developing quite consistently over many centuries. Brought about by the scale of these processes, these changes must not only be seen as losses: local phenomena of globalisation have emerged as a response, often drawing on the values of local cultural traditions and heritage in the process of identity building. These are just a few examples that show that the world has not become a global village. Contemporary research is moving away from analysis limited to the collection of data on physical material. This methodological shift was strongly influenced by the structuralist ideas and research of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who saw the house as an object creating a human social organisation (Lévi-Strauss 1988[1979]); in research, architecture has come to be seen as a parallel of language and the human body (Norberg-Schulz 1985: 111; Carsten, Hugh-Jones 1995: 2; Daujotytė-Pakerienė 2019: 17). Since the late 1960s, the world has begun to explore local architecture as the (utilitarian) architecture that best suits the human’s needs and reflecting their cultural and ethnic belonging. In Lithuania, such research best corresponds to the widely studied folk, traditional architecture. The concepts of vernacular and folk architecture are close not only linguistically, but also in terms of being created ‘of and for the people’ (Oliver 2006: XXVI): emphasis is placed on the possession of construction know-how sufficient to enable people, households, or communities themselves to build the buildings they need (Oliver 2006: XXIII, XXVII-XXVIII). The transmission of construction knowledge in this way refers to traditions handed down from generation to generation, which raises the question of how vernacular architecture can be defined in today's post-traditional, technocratic society. The image of the detached house as a good standard of living is widespread in Western society. The recent experience of the pandemic in society highlighted the importance of the house and home as a personal, private human space. In a time of an ecological crisis, the importance of the house as a safe place should only increase, but, according to Sigurd Bergman, the house and the sustainable architectural solutions that go with it can at the same time contribute to the transition from the Anthropocene to the Ecocene (Bergman 2021: 178).1 This is also supported by research in Lithuania, which has examined traditional, ethnic architecture in the context of the contemporary climate crisis and has searched for environmentally friendly solutions (Parasonis, Keizikas et al. 2012; Keizikas, Andriušytė, Šiožinytė 2012; Varanauskaitė 2014b; Andriušytė 2018).Vilnius County was chosen for the study because its architecture has never been seen as a homogeneous vernacular architecture due to the historical and political events and, consequently, cultural dynamics. Globalisation has only exacerbated these dynamics. After the restoration of independence, such processes as economic migration from various parts of Lithuania to the capital city, market conditions creating opportunities to build houses that meet people's wishes and possibilities, and, as a consequence, the expansion of the city boundaries, the increasing density of construction and the increasing cost of land in the city and its environs have begun to draw the contours of a distinctive, cityspecific form of individual housing construction. The research problem: local features of contemporary architecture and construction practices of individual detached housing in a location actively affected by globalisation and modernisation processes. The object of research: contemporary detached dwellings built within the boundaries of Vilnius County after 1990. The aim of research: exploring the forms and meanings of contemporary individual residential architecture.

Market orientation (market orientation) is a measure of behavior and activity that reflects the implementation of the marketing concept. Ironically, although the marketing concept has been developed in the decade of the 1950s, it was only in the 1990s that empirical studies began to be conducted to examine the marketing concepts of business strategy and success. In line with the development of the business world today a term "Global Village" was born stating that a mechanism of world trade is described as a market in a village. The concept of thought is translated as an increasingly smaller market phenomenon with the support of technological advances and information as factors important for companies to be able to innovate, adapt and respond automatically to consumers. International marketing is one activity that is in line with Global Village thinking. In accordance with the development of increasingly global information technology, global consumers also experience developments in terms of culture. Because culture is attached to consumers which is a major factor in international trade. This study aims to analyze more deeply the relationship between market orientation and company performance and changes in global consumer culture. The research method used in the study was a qualitative approach with analytical techniques using the Miles and Huberman models. The data used in this study are secondary data that have been officially published through articles and other studies that relate to the topics that are the focus of research.

Media of communication, particularly material media, are seen by some as the main factor of an increasing cultural integration towards Marshall McLuhan's global village, and by others as the core component of a common supra-national and supra-ethnical culture. Archivists in North America have tended to act from within their own culture, and to reject the idea of a universal body of knowledge, on the grounds that records are unique expressions of unique societies. Will they be able to cope with the global record of a very close future without the support of a global conceptual underpinning? This article maintains that, albeit unrecognized by many, a common body of theoretical and methodological archival knowledge has existed for a long time and has guided the practices of archival professionals everywhere, and that such body of knowledge rests on the universal nature of records, a nature that will allow archivists to cope with the challenges presented by the new global forms of communication. This article is a revision of the Plenary Address given by the author at the Midwest Archives Conference Meeting, October 14-16, 1993, in Davenport, Iowa.

Ethical literary criticism reads interprets and analyzes literature from an ethical perspective. It argues that literature is a unique expression of ethic and morality within a certain historical period, and that literature is not just an art of language but rather an art of text. In light of ethical literary criticism, moral enlightenment and education are literature’s primary function, while aesthetic appreciation is merely second to it. Specifically, ethical literary criticism seeks to unpack the ethical features of literary works, to describe characters and their lives from the vantage point of ethics, and to make ethical judgments about them. In the history of human civilization, mankind underwent two important processes: natural selection and ethical selection. Natural selection allowed human beings to evolve from apes physically, whereas ethical selection distinguishes them from animals spiritually. In an ethical sense, mankind is the outcome of the Sphinx factor, which can be seen as the combination of the human and animal factors. The Sphinx factor is the central element expressed in literary works.

Globalization has made this world inter-connected. World is turning into global village, where there is an amalgamation of various cultures. Migration has been a part of human history. Due to such mass movements multicultural societies came into existence which is quickly changing the face of the modern world. Though there are many challenges in the way of peaceful establishment of such societies but still these are rapidly blooming in the various parts of USA, Canada, Australia and many European nations. These multicultural societies make world vibrant as these have a lot to offer from knowledge, values, customs, beliefs and to new perspectives. Thus, proliferation of multicultural societies should be motivated by the governments and the people in general. These can make further strengthen relations between different communities so that all can work for mutual progress and thus world peace is achieved.

Described as ‘one of the most tragic human experiences in human history’, the Soviet Union as an empire holds much intrigue and fascination for the Western world. It held unquestionable status as an empire, with its coverage of over 100 nationalities. Its status as the ‘Last of the Empires’ depends on what the future may hold, but any future ‘empires’ will undoubtedly be based on intellectual and institutional foundations far different from those developed during the Soviet era. Here John Keep presents the narrative history of the USSR, from the last years of Stalin, to the chickened fate of Gorbachev’s reform policies, and the ultimate collapse of the empire under manifold centrifugal pressures. Focusing upon political, economic, social, and cultural developments, the book is divided into four parts: the last years of Stalin; Nikita Krushchev’s abortive attempts to reform Communist rule; the years 1964-1985, covered largely by Breshnev’s long tenure of power; and lastly Gorbachev’s abortive attempts to promote a reformed, ‘democratic’, communism.

A long-standing debate on the dynamics of population growth in human history has become polarized between a Malthusian stance and a Boserupian one. The former tends to view population growth as limited by carrying capacity, dependent on environment and technology, whereas the latter sees population growth itself as a major inducement to social, economic and technological developments. In this paper the authors experiment with approaching this debate by using recent developments in evolutionary theory. According to these, evolutionary principles, as expounded by Charles Darwin and subsequent evolutionary scientists, apply not only to biological evolution but also to social or cultural evolution. Here, the role of genes is taken over by culture and, since culture is much more pliable than our DNA, evolution speeds up. As the only organisms on Earth whose evolution relies as heavily on culture as on genes, humans have become extremely adaptable. Their hyper-adaptability suggest that humans, through their cultural evolution, have managed increasingly to adapt to their own growing population, thus succeeding in accommodating ever-growing numbers. This hypothesis fits the Boserupian approach to population very well but less so the Malthusian one, perhaps indicating a gradual shift from a Malthusian regime to a Boserupian one in human history. The hypothesis is discussed and examined through four case studies: The beginning of farming around Gobekli Tepe in southeast Turkey, the productive farming systems of Tiwanaku in South America, the population crisis of late medieval and early modern Iceland, and the ‘collapse’ of Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

This paper sets out to analyze the depiction of Nigerian traditional religious practices vis-à-vis Western religious practices in some Nigerian movies against the backdrop that some Nollywood films are imbued with ideologies that uphold and promulgate western Christian values at the expense of core Nigerian traditional religious values. Previous studies demonstrate that the tendency in Western religious thought has been to see African cultural practices and spirituality as void of moral character in the history of human civilization deserving distillation. It is unfortunate that the tendency for most African filmmakers is still to produce contents that discredit Nigerian spirituality by portraying it as void of moral character. The study is informed by Multimodal Discourse Analysis which provides methodological tools applied in the analyses of the selected movies. The paper, therefore, analyses the discursive strategies used to promote western Christian practices against those of Nigeria in particular and Africa at large in the movies under study. This paper assumes that Nigerian traditional religions and spirituality are depicted in contrast to western religious values in a conflicting space. By depicting custodians of Nigerian traditional religions and spirituality in malevolent practices in contrast to custodians of western religion depicted as benevolent, the filmmakers in the films under study undermine the essence of Nigerian core values. The analyses demonstrate that the Nollywood movies selected for the study are imbued with stereotypes that serve a colonial agenda by properly engaging Nigeria’s religious history with western religions. They serve as a medium through which western religious ideologies are upheld at the detriment of traditional Nigerian values in particular and African in general.

ABSTRACTConsumers in societies that are still strongly influenced by traditional cultural values experience tension when traditional cultural values conflict with consumerist values. This paper aims at providing a theoretical explanation for these tensions using the theory of Self-discrepancy. The study, conducted in Sri Lanka, used an interpretive qualitative approach, where data were collected through interviews with a middle-class consumer segment from a relatively strong traditional cultural background, but who are also significantly exposed to the consumer culture. The findings demonstrate that cultural tension can be explained as resulting from different forms of Self-discrepancy and that there are differences between the nature and intensity of tension experienced by consumers with different sociodemographic characteristics. In particular, the tension appears to be greater among consumers who had moved to urban areas from rural Sri Lanka, whose affiliation with cultural values is strong, and among parents with dependent children because the children are very strongly influenced by the consumer culture. The theory of Self-expansion in conjunction with the theory of Self-discrepancy is used in the attempt to explain the dynamics between parent and child.

This research attempts to trace the most significant development caused by the information revolution, namely "the Communication Technology" which reduced the distances between different urban communities, or within a single one, eliminated the geographical boundaries and the transformed the world into a global village. This led to the emergence of new forms and bodies to those urban communities; perhaps the most important is the fragmentation of the major cities and the emergence of (Satellite Cities) with global links, rather than hinterlands to the local capital cities as in the past. But in spite of the technological tide of communications and its inevitable impacts, it stays, with all its possibilities, a reaction that occurs only in one direction and within the limits of no more than sending and receiving nothing more. This is what Arab cities had seen in the recent stages of their change.Here arises the problem of the emergence of the communication act as a "Dogmatic" because the whole world revolved around the communications network ... Which in turn became the heart of the system of this era. In light of this problem, this research has sought to find the act parallel if not alternative that will fold the " Communication " between its wings, making it, the stage of the process of response and interaction surpassing the limits of sending and receiving. In other words the transition fromimporting technology to the process of contributing to its production. This only takes place through the investment of the Communications Technology to achieve that which is the highest and noblest, posed in this research by the "Communicativeness" between communities. To achieve this goal it took the building of the theoretical framework, in the light of which we put forward the hypothesis of the research that reads (Communication in its technological dimension and Communicativeness in its social dimension, both, play a role in the formulation of Satellite Cities of the twenty-first century through their essential impact on the physical, social and economic infrastructure development of those cities). The research, then, sought to test the validity of this hypothesis and draw conclusions and recommendations.

Death of Philosophy or the Death of Postmodernism: How Far We Can Liberate the Human Mind?