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from the bleeding-hearts-and-artists-making-a-stand dept.
Silicon Valley is dictating the way we live through design. From smartphones to dating websites, we increasingly experience the world and basic human connection through platforms and devices Silicon Valley created for us. It is the artist’s job to turn a critical eye on the world we live in. At the Rhizome event, it seemed like the artists were deeply troubled by the ways in which technology is limiting our ability to see that world.
There is the common refrain that everyone’s eyeballs are glued to their smartphones, even while walking into traffic, but this is a deeper concern, that the way we are designing technology is taking away the best parts of our humanity. On Facebook, you must “like” everything. On Vine, things must be interesting in 7 seconds or less. On Google, you must optimize or you will disappear.
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Technologists tend to think about their creations in terms of code and efficiency, whereas artists excel at helping us see the humanity in the machine, pinpointing moments of beauty, ugliness and truth in the way we live. We need artists to help save us from the ‘fitter, happier, more productive’ world that Silicon Valley is creating, a world that doesn’t seem to be making us all as happy as it promised. The Rhizome experiment is just the start of getting technologists to think more deliberately about the world they are making the rest of us live in.
Are technologists dehumanizing the world?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Monday August 03 2015, @12:08PM
90% of the internet serves no purpose and exists only to capture peoples' attention so advertisers can sling their pitches. That's what these technologists are doing to "us", I guess.
Advertisers are not technologists, they are arts people. The vast majority of web site designers are arts people. Steve Jobs was an arts person. Not all "artists" paint landscapes and portraits, or make sculptures, in fact only a tiny minority of them do (after college anyway) or can earn a living that way.
When the internet was owned entirely by techies it was used almost entirely for the transmission of technical information, without graphics, and that was all they imagined it would ever be used for. Don't blame techies for what it has become.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @12:55PM
When the internet was owned entirely by techies it was used almost entirely for the transmission of technical information, without graphics,
If by technical information you include pr0n, sure.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @02:16PM
Ah, CSHOW was a delight to behold. For informational purposes only, of course.
I am not sure who actually downloaded pictures of like balloons and apples and trees and stuff, except for vendors selling new VGA monitors and needed something family friendly to display in the store. Then bikini pictures came out, too.