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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: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @12:45PM
Old always complain about the young's pointless addictions.
Its no different than complaining about kids watching TV (mine don't, they're all about the youtube). TV used to be described as a vast wasteland because everybody watched a few channels of crap, but now nobody watches hundreds of channels of crap, its all about streaming paid video or streaming ad supported youtube video. I have a perfectly good 10+ year old mythtv system with great HDTV OTA reception and also some cable channels and there's basically nothing to record anymore, or nothing to watch that doesn't have better quality than streaming it for free or a subscription I already have.
Music industry rock music from the 50s was an instrument of the devil, before than comic books were ruining our children in the 20s/30s... Just old people whining.
Note that young people are really bad about understanding fads. Even the kids themselves will be laughing about people using facebook soon enough, ha ha people back then were so stupid, but us modern kids would never do anything that dumb like sit around all day clicking like on facebook feeds. Yeah, sure, kids have been saying that kind of stuff for at least a century.
I don't think the artists have anything to worry about. The person thats clicking like compulsively wasn't sitting in the art museum B.F. (before facebook). They were doing the usual fad BS. The artists aren't losing anything.