Luciano
PetullàTangling with media and computer liquidity
The dimensions of ubiquitous computing and the grasp of world
Summary
The book contains some reflections about ways and pervasiveness with which new digital technologies are amalgamating with our lives contributing to transform them. They are mostly observations risen around developments or launch of particular technological products/gadgets, sons of wonders that in such moments unite specialists and technologists, of extremely interesting discussions and reflections that would merit - for intensity and acuteness of look - a bigger attention.
Meanwhile, we are all irresistible absorbed in a dense digital network that works as a dematerialised/deterritorialised but real and lively infrastructure, with and on which we experience and expand much various emotions/activities, organizing social networks on scale that, in their indefiniteness for our increasingly synchronic condition, we define glocal (global/local).
In effect, as noted, it is in our nature considering infrastructures as granted, feeling them as something that “stays there”, ready-made and completely transparent, something on which something else “runs” or “works”, being rails on which cars go or computers run software programs. They remain on background, subtracted to the scene, in a toolness that hides their intense relational dynamics and continuous trials of sustainability at which, as common goods, they are directly and indirectly exposed. From this point of view, Ict infrastructures are even more deceitful, counting - just for their peculiar constitution, shapeness, and applicative expandability - on effects, to say, of a double transparency.
This work tries to make visible and thick background processes, to evidence components and relations that - in a scenery of increasingly media and informational liquidity - are originally characterizing our existences. In effect, the ubiquitous presence and availability of Ict technologies predispose us to a communicative porousness and relational ecology interesting not only the ways people or groups meet each other and manage social activities into the more disparate environments, but also the terms of inter-mediation among the variegated entities inserted in these networks. With diffusion and embedding of electronic and wireless microcircuits into the objects, bodies and every kind of environment, we are assisting at a digital innervations that is also a social and cultural re-blooding involving any sort of component and process, a work uses the power and the art of remediation of two genre of specific but now convergent technological developments, media and computers. The book considers some effects of this technological alchemy that combines in a new way the ability of media to “make the world” and the functional efficiency of computing to create automatic procedures around phenomena and activities of physical and social reality, opening continuously new paths at “otherwise possible”.
As well-noted by sociology, their aid to organize wide and, at the same time, integrated socio-technical systems was fundamental for modern societies and people’s experiences, that have accustomed to new way of imagining and acting, as well as new situational geographies, bearing problematics and ambiguities of a condition that tends to overcome the closer world of face-to-face interaction. In effect, these processes don’t offer any warrantee of sistematism, risking often to not be able to reflect and contain behaviours, experiences, knowledges and competences maturing in societies, while the very technologies of mediation are supports sensitive to crises and changes of people’s life. Factor and symptom of these transitions, technological emergence offers itself as one of the most vivid field to explore their tensions, facing both problematics and ambiguity of balances, and novelty of solutions that delineate more appropriate horizons of concreteness.
Taking inspiration from some recent Ict implementations centred on forms and relations between physical world of bodies and objects and the digital world of networks, the book advances some reflections about the nature, ibridations and criticalness of our actual life re-configuration, underlining experiential pregnancy of a condition in which human being goes back, in a sort of animism, to be part of a never-ending dialogue with the various surrounding entities, being persons, web pages, voice mail, games or artificial intelligences (personages of video-games, bots, interactive software programs, components of automobile, anthropomorphic puppets and friendly artifacts as Nabaztag, availabot, Uebbi, etc.).
(Lampi di stampa 2009)
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INDEX
Introduction
The porous dimensions of ubiquitous info-communication
The media and computer liquidity
Logic and aesthetics of multimedia telephone
Tiny/big signals
The iPhone case
Multimediality, digital convergence and personalization
Business models, old actors and newcomers
The device
Aesthetics of iPhone
Aesthetics as experience
iPhone and the aesthetisation of information tool
iPhone and the aesthetics of network society
The "Cloud Computing"
Cybersocialities
The solid architectures of “cloud computing”
The socialization of informatics
The new economics of scale
Means and contents
Critics of web 2.0
Digital morphogenesis
Questions of presence
Inter-actions by dissemination
Bifocal beings, local and global
Dis-locations
Re-foundations
Bibliography
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