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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 Nuke on Monday August 03 2015, @10:10AM
WTF have they got to do with "de-humanising" ? I thought they were about bringing people together. Better than sitting in a basement waiting for "heaven" to do something,because it doesn't happen. Of course, "artists" move in circles where they meet plenty of other people and by nature are perfectly at ease with this. Despite being supposedly "imaginative" they cannot imagine any other way of life.
Major misconception about Dating Websites that non-users have :- incredibly, they seem to think that you are compelled to date/partner/marry someone that the computer choses for you. I have heard people say "I wouldn't want a computer to choose my partner for me!"
Before Dating Websites, there were dating clubs and marriage bureaux where either you first exchanged letters after browsing through lists of people, or the bureau arranged an exchange of letters or a direct blind date between people. Such facilities existed at least back into Victorian times. Absolutely nothing to do with computers.
Once you meet someone, you decide whether to continue with it or not, no matter how the introduction was done.