Editorial: Technology and Culture (original) (raw)
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Between Technology and Teleology: Can Digital Age Embrace Analog Experience of Culture?
Transforming Culture in the Digital Age, 2010
Cultures stand at a critical junction in history. Modern society confronts the burden of gifts and curses of digital technology where the lines between real relations and virtual relations become blurred, and interconnections between cultural objects and their respective signs become trivialized. Digital technology affects our entire cultural practices exemplified in global exchanges of information, freedom of expression, and the unprecedented sphere of choices. Although digitization is an advantageous technological achievement of speed and accuracy, it impoverishes the role of the analog mode in experiencing the undifferentiated cultural reality. The real world seems to be replaced by images that make themselves the epitome of reality, where technology is viewed as a factitious god, making its own rules and aims at nothing but itself. The mass rush to digitization comes with an imaginative result but with a high price. Although the nature of life favors optimization over maximization, effectiveness rather than efficiency, digitization continues to be our path to efficient maximization. And because of our convenient habits, it is impossible for our technologically advanced society to resurrect the good-old days. The debate among proponents and opponents of digital technology and its roles in the transformation of culture seems to lead to confusion and frustration. Several questions are raised to organize this debate and to seek more sensibility and understanding: In what way does digital age endanger cultural reality? How can the information age help to preserve the identity of cultures in our ever-changing and homogenizing digital world? How do we capitalize on the power of virtual reality to maintain cultural memory? What fundamentally different ways of thinking and interacting with digital information enable us to transform and sustain cultures? What roles do digital communication play in moving beyond the pseudo-social life to authentic cultural practices? This paper introduces a different theoretical framework by juxtaposing the competing yet mutually reinforcing role of technology and the idea of teleology. The theoretical framework draws from philosophy (e.g. Jean Baudrillard, Jean Gebser), semiotics (e.g. Charles S. Peirce, Yuri M. Lotman) and contemporary systems thinking (e.g. Ervin Laszlo, Humberto Maturana); and substantiated by historical events and traditional cultural practices. Based on this framework, and by reframing the challenge at hand, the paper calls for a design approach, engaging producers and users in a co-creating process that seeks a purposeful integration of humans and machines, and leads to new forms of cultural semiosphere. A conclusion is reached calling for an eco-humanistic understanding to cultural transformation, and suggests that: 1) digital technology is best viewed as a means to an end, where the means and the end reciprocate purposefully in an integrative circularity; and 2) persevering and feeling comfortable with the paradoxical and tensional relationship between techne and teleos can bring forward a sustainable and desirable future that transcend virtual reality into an authentic and enhanced cultural reality. This is what our digital age needs for cultural transformation.
Springer eBooks, 2016
The analysis presents some reflections on the changes produced by the use of digital technologies in contemporary Western societies. The scope is to understand the occurrences of the recent past, from the second half of the 1900s, and what is happening in social and individual experiences today. To devise a future, to decide how, when and what to offer in order to transmit to young people the fields of knowledge and skills that will be of use for managing their future successfully in a changing Europe. The prevailing theoretical approach is from an anthropological cultural point of view with interdisciplinary encounters. The chapter is divided into three parts: the first two are general reflections on the role of digital technologies in the past and present and focus on questions, expectations, characteristics that have interested scholars over time. The third level looks at the problematic features of people who were born after 1980, the so-called 'digital natives'. The aim of this article is to understand the cultural changes brought about by the rapid diffusion of the new communications technology in the globalized context of the West. The main slant is from a cultural anthropological point of view, but it is inevitably also interdisciplinary due to the common ground shared with philosophy, psychology and sociology. The analysis intends to make some proposals on how to think about a European future, and how to intervene consciously in the current situation so that it keeps pace with the young, the so-called 'digital natives' (Prensky 2001). In order to do this, I begin by tracing a brief outline of the reasons why the discipline of cultural anthropology plays such an important role in the understanding of the digital revolution which today is a part of our everyday life.
Deciphering the Design of Digital Technologies. A Challenge for a More Reflexive Digital Culture?
Hybrid, 2016
In order to follow digital developments in a critical way, it seems essential to contribute to the production of a speech that can summarize power relations regarding digital tools and contribute to raise awareness of the necessity to take a reflexive and critical look on its sociotechnical environment among the citizens. To do so, we propose to open the “black box” of tools, to consider their conception logics in a critical way. Here, technology design is thought as the process that “make a political project become technological” and broadcasts some sort of “digital governmentality.” By focusing on the concrete analysis of technologies, it is necessary to put emphasis on the way they guide, set boundaries and configure practices by defining possibilities of action, which are then more or less updated in use.
Visions of Excess: Cyberspace, digital technologies and new cultural politics
"This paper critically situates contemporary concerns with cyberspace and digital media within a cultural dimension. In doing this it sets the emerging new communication technologies alongside issues of cultural limits and boundaries. The paper begins by undertaking ground clearing work about the nature of cyberspace and providing an analytical index of its position in relation to its imaginary or real status. It is argued that cyberspace is destined to attract two competing responses; first for being too true to life; and second for not being true enough. It is argued that these tensions are part of the cyberspatial embodiment of certain significant cultural aesthetics which are subsequently interwoven into the fabric of popular technoculture. This embodiment projects a number of competing claims and characterisations for the potential of digital media through slogans of cyberspace. The paper addresses how spatial metaphors, forms of technological enhancement, Utopian aesthetics, technoculture and posthuman philosophy are framed as 'frontier discourse'. The materialism of transhumanist and extroprian politics is examined from a phenomenological standpoint. These frontier projects posit a 'disclosing space' for digital media which offer a radical 'crossing over' from the human to nonhuman computer mediated environment. By way of phenomenological analysis these new cultural politics are shown to be intimations of the real and an illusion of radical otherness which is chimerical and exemplary of unreflexive 'modes of becoming'."
2010
Digital culture is a new and complex concept. Digital advances are increasingly interacting with the world of culture and the arts, leading to a convergence of technologies, media and information and shaping comm unication modes. The new possibilities offered by the digital technologies -namely, global connectivity and the emergence of new net works-challenge our traditional understanding of culture and make it necessary for us to take on the board the concept of a di gital culture. This article views digital culture as a new social system that determines experiences and opportunities for the citizens of today. Digital technologies and the networked environment have introduced new practices, opportunities and threats, and the cu lture sector needs to find appropriate ways for operating in this new reality.
Culture and Society in the Digital Age
Information , 2021
This paper aims to examine a theoretical framework of digital society and the ramifications of the digital revolution. The paper proposes that more attention has to be paid to cultural studies as a means for the understanding of digital society. The approach is based on the idea that the digital revolution’s essence is fully manifested in the cultural changes that take place in society. Cultural changes are discussed in connection with the digital society’s transformations, such as blurring the distinction between reality and virtuality and among people, nature, and artifacts, and the reversal from informational scarcity to abundance. The presented study develops a general model of culture. This model describes the spiritual, social, and technological facets of culture. Such new phenomena as individualization, transparisation, and so-called cognification (intellectualization of the surrounding environment) are suggested as the prominent trends characterizing the above cultural facets.
The Extension of the Coloniality of Power into Digital Culture
Symbolic Interaction, 2016
In a time when media, social media, nations, and educational settings feed ideas to us in increasingly small sound-bites that are digested on the run, it is refreshing to find a book which takes the time to delve into ontological and epistemic questions relevant to our digitally infused world today. Stingl disentangles the meaning of digital culture and how power and inequality become manifest within digital realms with great care. His main purpose is to problematize the legitimacy of the digital age by taking a necessarily irreverent approach in considering digital culture, from social media to health care to education, and how this impacts us as political beings. He finds that the digital realm does not create inequality, but rather extends preexisting divisions and power relations, thus extending colonial relations into our online worlds and creating an extension of the coloniality of power and Being; a "Digital Coloniality of Power." Of the seven main chapters, the first, and longest, lays out the philosophical, political theory, and sociological underpinning of the book. Here, Stingl confronts, and revels in, questions such as; what constitutes a political actor? What is the relationship of individualism and democracy? How is Digital Culture implicated? What of the silent/silenced Other? Beginning with the relationship of Digital Culture to democracy, he pulls together an impressive array of literature. He finds that fascination with the "Individual" compounds the digital coloniality of power. He explores the idea of the individual in depth, mulling over every aspects that has arisen in the literature since the Greek concept of the oikos. Stingl ranges across topics as one idea leads into another, including defining publics and states, narratives, mulitiplicity, capitalism and forms of government, acceleration, the cyborg, power, the difference between empowerment and enablement, and what it means to "think with" things. He argues that the relationship among capitalism, democracy, and power is not only problematic, but also carries over into the digital realm where it is exacerbated by a modern