Archive for the ‘new technologies’ tag
Our worlds (digital and breathing)
Role of the curator
Traditionally, the curator has been affiliated to the modern museum as the persona who manages an archive, and arranges and communicates knowledge to an audience, according to fields of expertise (art, archaeology, cultural or natural history etc.). However, in the late twentieth century the role of the curator changes – first on the art-scene and later in other more traditional institutions – into a more free-floating, organizational and ’constructive’ activity that allows the curator to create and design new wider relations, interpretations of knowledge modalities of communication and systems of dissemination to the wider public.
Technophilia vs technophobia
Two extreems – relationship of communication over the cofy and over the mobile phone.
Technophilia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Technophilia and technophobia are the two extremes of the relationship between technology and society. The technophobe fears or dislikes technology, often regarding some or all technology with fear. This may be as a consequences of fear of change, a prior catastrophic experience with technology or because it may lead to a process of dehumanization. The technophile sees most or all technology as positive, adopting technology enthusiastically, and seeing it as a means to potentially improve life and combat social problems.
Technophobia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Technophobia is the fear or dislike of advanced technology or complex devices, especially computers.[1] The term is generally used in the sense of an irrational fear, but others contend fears are justified. It is the opposite of technophilia.
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”
The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity.
While Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the
modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel,
began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and
psychological terms. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”,
Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new
social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was
transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space,
inculcating in them a “blasé attitude”, and altering fundamental
notions of freedom and being:
| “ | The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. (“The Metropolis and Mental Life”) |
control-information society
Multitudes Web – Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society
Beneath the rosy images of the information society lie
the stark goals of ’control and reduction in the costs of labour’
(Negri 1978, 254).Such analysis is by no means unique to autonomists.
Indeed awareness of the role of informatics in the neoliberal assault
on the working class has generated an influential line of quasi-Marxist
’neo-Luddism’. Based largely on ’labour process’ perspectives derived
froth Braverman’s (1974) seminal studies on the ’degradation of work’,
but with important strands in media studies, this seeks to expose the
new technologies as instruments for deskilling and ’mind management’
(Schiller 1976) and to revive, at least intellectually, the resistant
tradition of 19th century machine-breakers (e.g. Noble, 1983, 1984 ;
Webster and Robins 1986).