Long Thoughts

Origins and Social Meanings of Algorithmic Culture

Luciano Petullà · October 10, 2023

Abstract The social sciences have much to say about the cybernetic turn our lives have taken thanks to the use and intermediation of software applications spread through the Internet. The book Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet by Ted Striphas takes the burden of explaining with originality and expertise the deep cultural history of this epochal turn, offering us useful reflections to interpret and make sense of the current expansion of our relations with the machinic world. Introduction The mass diffusion and adoption of information and communication …

ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence, in the technical-moral jumble of new cultural software

Luciano Petullà · March 25, 2023

The popularity of the ChatGPT software is an opportunity to discuss the merits of a problem that will mark the 21st century’ scenarios in many areas of our life – namely the growing development of intelligent devices that autonomously carry out tasks previously supported only by human beings, intervening in sensitive contexts for their economic, social and cultural value. From a historical point of view it is time that discussing Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer considered as an area reserved only for a certain professionalized elite. Starting from the 2000s – …

The environmentalism communication between shock, reason and allurement

Luciano Petullà · January 18, 2023

The last months of 2022 have seen an escalation in the demonstrative actions by the younger generations aiming to combat the substantial indifference of national governments with respect to the growing degradation of the environment in which all beings (human and otherwise) try to live. After years of debates on the unsustainability of the economic and social development models established in the world almost everywhere, thanks to the perverse effects caused by climate change we have come to verify with growing concern, day by day, the guilty weight of such …

Posthumanism as transformative thought

Luciano Petullà · November 10, 2022

For a new anthropological space of the human It is time to reflect on the question of having social analyzes capable of indicating and even soliciting effective changes in human societies. We are living in a historical period in which there is a strong feeling of being faced with an end of evolutionary cycle on many aspects that are decisive for life in common, and this justifies the need to have analytical tools that shift one's focus onto new paths of investigation. We can and we must continue to deepen the evolutions that take place in the confinements in which …

An investigation on artificial voice and the social-cultural aspects of sound event

Luciano Petullà · June 25, 2022

A cultural history of the talking machines Despite its important role for social life, sound as event per se isn't much problematize in the field of social science. But yet we practically float in an universe of different sounds, meaning events produced by pressures on the air – it can be defined as the raw phenomenon – that we then interpret as a rumor more or less defined or signals of articulated and pregnant sense. The book La voce artificiale. Un’indagine media-archeologica sul computer parlante (The artificial voice. A media-archaeological investigation on …