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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 03 2015, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
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.
...
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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @08:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @08:46PM (#217574)

    I disagree.
    There is no reason that a tech venture can't employ artsy types to make the facade of their products more appealing.
    In fact, it happens all the time.
    Sometimes form even follows function and you get something better than the technologists' prototype.

    Apple, Sony

    Interesting that you chose 2 of my least-favorite corporations.

    Mr Sony

    There never was a "Mr. Sony".
    "Sony" is a misspelling.
    The name is a reference to USAians thinking of each of the post-war Japanese people as "sonny boy" and the We'll-show-them attitude of those Asian industrialists.

    -- gewg_