Technology, Art and Society

CRITICAL COMMETARY OF THE BOOK

“TECHNOLOGY, ART AND SOCIETY”

BY VALENTÍN ROMA

1 Excerpts from books

 1.1 Introduction

Technology impelled a new turbulence in the complex process of privatization of the spaces of the home. (Page 12)

The media ensured the privatization of domestic spaces, but only in exchange for providing the necessary social coverage through "lifestyle". (Page 13)

1.2 A professional self

Mobility appears as the perfect panacea to camouflage a situation that is in full transformation and to fill a social life that must now seek new horizons. (Page 19)

Those who cannot assume a fluid relationship with machines are going to have a tough time if they are looking for work. (P.30)

More and more people are working from home, this is mainly due to telework (p.49)

While modern capitalism was constituted by a clear and strict division between the space of labor and the living space, a division marked out by a middle class anxious to maintain an intimate independence, it is now curious to note how this dynamic has gradually acquired a reverse direction. (Pp. 49-50)

Customers do not buy the products, the products buy the customers. (Page 53)

The transformations that ICTs are raising in rich countries, filling the free time we find between our work schedules, between our family obligations and during our leisure time. (P.55)

"The diversification in the form of the different medias and their contents mean that these are less able to dictate the temporal structure of the day", so the responsibility lies solely on the citizen to establish hierarchies of use according to his or her interests and strategies. Livingstone (page 56)

The user tends to conceive the act of communicating as a permanently productive and efficient tool, as if it were a personal commitment. (Page 57)

The Internet provided a space-time order in which the user, whoever it was, became a producer, manager and distributor of information, both of his own [information] and that of others. Without leaving home and with increasingly affordable costs. (Page 64)

To what extent has the corporate culture penetrated the home under the idea that the computer can develop work skills? (Page 67)

The growing interaction between young people and digital technology has given way for concepts such as productivity to manifest clearly and expansively. However, productivity is generated from the interests, desires (and why not, fears) of individuals. (Page 71)

Individual appliance manufacturers live their sleep far more awkwardly than we might think. (Page 72)

1.3 Public individuals and privatized spaces

A certain public space is eliminated by the introduction of systematizing elements that will finally bring about changes in the way in which people relate to one another. (Page 73)

Active public spaces are those that result in an action with common effects and not merely individual effects. (Page 75)

A city was built to be seen, not lived in: some critics have called these public spaces as non-places, defined as world's that have been destined to individuality and the ephemeral landscape. (Page 93)

"The public space has died and there’s a reason for it; the clearest one is that it has died for those who seek in the intimate ground what has been denied to them on a foreign plane. The intimate vision is induced in proportion to the abandonment suffered by the empty public domain. " George Senett (page 95)

In other words, ICTs create a multiplicity of spaces and times that make us perennial actors according to circumstances of strategic uses. Individuals take the public space as if it were a scenario, on which they advertise their private biographies without losing the sense of intimacy. The public and the private thus adopt radically new relationships. But as these change, so must our readings and interpretation of technologies in order to undertake new constructive ways. (Page 97)

When we take our portable gadgets and use them in public places we make these spaces more complex, as we are "visibly" giving our private worlds to the public space. How each person behaves depends only on oneself. (Page 102)

Public space thus becomes a scenario in which the role of each actor is a secret (or at any rate unknown) while at the same remaining attractive: it is private, but constructed in a way that generates public expectation, by becoming "coherent" through our use and consumption of a lifestyle. (P.110)

Faced with the disappearance of urban physical spaces in which to build the feeling of community, TCI become the new social paradigm, where the obsession of the individual that has a "realized" life and the new value that connectivity has assumed, are in a sort of "saving panacea". (Page 110)

1.4 Mobility

One of the most in depth readings of the process of diffusion of ICT is that which points to its hierarchical character; That is, that the first to spread them are the upper and middle classes and that, gradually, these are installed in the lower classes, as their production costs become cheaper and formats are standardized. (Page 111)

However, any media practice also depends on the sociopolitical context in which it is inserted. (Page 120)

These have been behaviors previously vetoed by young people - because of the absence of private spaces available - that have made the machine a place of socialization (when talking about the car and intimate relationships) (page 123)

Would it be feasible - desirable? - to turn connectivity and electronic culture into a more binding space than what it has been until now? (Page 133)

We have reduced the home to ourselves as individuals, and we carry it around in our backpacks. (Page 136)

To what extent is individual mobility not the mobility created by technologies?

-Herbert Collins- (p. 138)

Personal and external spaces and times are supposedly managed by individuals through their mobile phones and other devices. Meanwhile, at home, the world comes in through the screen and resounding in loudspeakers. We become more public than ever when we are proud of being private. (Page 142)

...