Arquivo para a ‘Digital Midia’ Categoria
Disenchantment, narration and pain
07
Jun
Chul Han remembers a very well-known habit in
many societies, which is telling children bedtime stories, I remember that it is old because they are famous: Aesop’s fables (ancient Greece), the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the stories organized by Charles Perrault and many others, Han will choose a little-known story (at least here in Brazil) by Paul Maar of young Konrad that he didn’t know how to narrate and his sister Susanne asks him to tell her a bedtime story.
The parents, on the other hand, liked to narrate, they were “almost addicted to it” and when the father finishes telling a story, the mother writes R for Roland on the paper and when the mother finishes telling the story, the father writes an O for Olivia, but the parents realize that Konrad can’t tell stories and send him to a certain Miss Muhse, he arrives at a small house and the lady who knows that he has come to learn how to tell stories asks him to go up a ladder and take a small package to his sister, but the The stairs seem endless until they meet a wall that opens like a door.
Inside it is all dark and he sees an owl with a strange voice and conversations and realizes that there is no floor and falls down a long path, finding Miss Muhse at the end who gives him another package and asks him to take it to her brother downstairs as he did not deliver the first one, Konrad is confused because he thought he had fallen to the ground floor, and he falls again into the “dark spaces” of the house and again Miss Muhse arrives who is now smoking a fine cigar and knows that he didn’t deliver the package and gives him another one again, he says “I’m not here to deliver little packages, I’m here to learn how to narrate”, she sees that she’s a lost cause, opens a door in the wall and says: “Happy sorting and all about bread” (she always changes the sayings) and this time he is back at his parents’ house (pages 74 to 77).
His parents and little sister are having breakfast and he says excitedly: “I have to tell you. You won’t believe what I experienced…”, Konrad’s world is now different and now his parents write K (for Konrad) on the paper they wrote down their narrations.
The disenchantment of the world is when everything is reduced to causality, facticity (today’s narratives say facts don’t lie, but under a partial interpretation), Walter Benjamin says that “children are the last inhabitants of the enchanted world” (pg. 79), I would say there is no more lightness, empathy and imagination in the “adult” world.
“Children today hunt for information like digital Easter eggs” (pg. 80), today the “lack of narrative interiority distinguishes photographs from souvenir images… photographs portray data without internalizing it… they don’t want to say nothing… “ and this is why I conclude that data may not be, and almost always is not, information.
It is even more difficult to understand what knowledge is as an experience: “the narrative is opposed to chronological facticity” (pg. 81), recalls Han reading Marcel Proust and also Benjamin that the aura is precisely the “distance of the gaze that awakens in the observed object ” (pg. 82) and will also remind you of Karl Kraus quoted in Benjamin: “the closer you look at a word, the further away it seems to be” (pg. 83).
The denarrativized memory is like a “junk store” here the author remembers Paul Virilio (Information and Apocalypse) being the “deposit full of all kinds of completely disordered, poorly preserved images and worn out symbols” (pg. 84), where one finds makes “a pile of data or information does not have a story. It is not narrative, but cumulative” (pg. 84).
This chapter ends in a very pleasant and sensitive way, after quoting excerpts from the works of Susan Sontag, Adorno and Gershom Scholem, paraphrasing the latter he writes: “The mythical fire in the forest has been forgotten. We no longer know how to say prayers. We are also not capable of secret meditations” (pg. 89) and I would say taking advantage of the topic Pain from the book “Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of tonality” (see previous posts) we no longer know the meaning of pain, of affection and we have lost any notion of the “whole”.
Han, B.C. (2023) A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Narration, digital culture and orality
06
Jun
Still in the section on Poverty and experience,
quoting Walter Benjamin, Byung-Chul wrote: “We became poor. We abandoned all the pieces of human heritage one after another, many of them had to pawn a hundredth of their value to receive in exchange the small currency of the ‘current’. The economic crisis is at the door, behind it is a shadow of the next war” (Han, 2023, pg. 37-38, citing Poverty and Experience by Benjamin), it was the threshold of the 2nd. World War.
In which modernity sums up happiness, the author explains “happiness is not a one-off event (pg. 43), today “when everything throws us into a current frenzy, when we are in the middle of the storm of contingencies, we are unhappy” ( pg. 44), recalls Marcel Proust “In Search of Lost Time” who understood the “rescue of the past as the narrator’s task” (pg. 45) and modern life as “a muscular atrophy”.
Disagreeing with Heidegger to reaffirm its contextual importance (also for today): “Being and time is not a timeless analysis of human existence, but a reflection of the temporal crisis of modernity” (pg. 45), “the being-itself of Heidegger is prior to the narrative context of life produced later. Being-a-i assures itself before telling itself a coherent story regarding the world of interiority” (pg. 47) and this explains the book we previously posted here, Heidegger’s Heart.
After a speech on some pages about new media: Phono sapiens, selfies, Facebook, it is a fixation of the author even though he recognizes Benjamin before this, even though he says correctly: “they are aligned in a syndetic way, without any narrative nexus” (pg. 51), recognizes that “Human memory always makes choices. In this aspect, it differs from a database”, a fundamental technical precision, which some people sometimes confuse with data without information, information without knowledge.
It predates even the emergence of the Gutenberg press and belongs to oral culture: “autobiographical narration presupposes a subsequent reflection on what was experienced, a work of conscious remembrance” (pg. 53) while “the quality of the data is better as they contain less consciousness” (idem), but it is necessary to remember the semantic search, the linking of data (linked data) and the use of Artificial Intelligence for narration that makes possible a consciousness beyond the “libidinal conscious” (idem) without ethics or morals.
Without mentioning oral culture, but the excerpt reminds her: “if everything that was experienced is present without distance, that is, it is available, the memory reappears” (pg. 56) and adds: “a flawless reproduction of the experience does not is a narrative, but a report or record” (ibidem) and remembers that whoever wants to narrate or remember “needs to be able to forget or let a lot of things slip” (pg. 57) and cannot be talking about anything other than the written culture, as oral culture is capable of forgetting details but will always remember what is experienced and through it remember the essentials and remember tradition.
Remembering the masters of cultures, their teachings and experiences is nothing other than oral culture, written culture is a “database”, a memory without reflection.
Han, B.C. (2023) A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Power in Foucault and Chul-Han
16
Apr
Michel Foucault broke with the classical
conceptions of the term power and defined it as a network of relationships where all individuals are involved, and we understand the network here with the modern sense of network, although it was vague in his time, individuals are both generators and recipients of power. movement of these relationships, however he identifies them as biopower, while Chul-Han identifies them as psychopower, and in a way adds the media to this.
State ideology, born from Hegel, is the basis of every history of contemporary power, authoritarianism and modern wars were born from a new idea of imperialism and colonialism, in which stronger states control power not only through weapons, but rather through biopower and now psychopower.
Foucault’s biopower, the state is the first level of power (he calls it a sector), the market is the second level, and the third is civil society, the idea of 4th. The power of the press comes from there.
He studied power not to develop a theory about it, but to identify aspects of subjectivity (in ontology it would be the question of Being), that is, subject over other subjects.
This is important to differentiate him from Chul-Han, who starts from the ontological relationships between beings and identifies the action of media and media structures that act on the psychology of power, so his idea of power (What is power) is like a domination technique that stabilizes and reproduces the dominated system through programming and psychological control.
Foucault sees biopower, as in the body as a training machine, since biopolitics, in the middle of the 18th century, was focused on regulatory controls on the population, the idea being that it was the population increase that caused misery and hunger.
Peter Sloterdijk, who supervised Chul-Han’s doctoral thesis on Heidegger, argues that this “training” process failed and thus, the control process develops towards the fourth power, which Chul-Han focuses excessively on the media, forgetting the 4th. power of the press, TV and cinema that had an enormous influence.
He develops pathologies of self-centeredness (narcissism), emotional instability (borderline) as responses to the demands of a society intoxicated with demands for efficiency, appearance and disciplinary coercion, wrote the author):
“The violence of decapitation is inherent to the pre-modern society of sovereignty; its medium is blood. Modern disciplinary society is, to a large extent, a society of negativity, being governed and dominated by disciplinary coercion, that is, by ‘social orthopedics’. Its form of violence is deformation. But neither decapitation nor deformation are capable of describing the postmodern performance society. It is dominated by a violence of positivity, which confuses freedom and coercion. Its pathological manifestation is depression” (Han 2018, pp. 183-184).
HAN, Byung-Chul. (2018) Psicopolítica: o neoliberalismo e as novas técnicas de poder. Brazil, Belo Horizonte: Âyiné.
Asceticism as human and spiritual elevation
16
May
It is not specific to a religion and is also defined in philosophy, from the
Greek áskesis, “spiritual exercise”, derived from ἀσκέω, “to exercise”, consisting of a practice or more practices that promote spiritual development, the simple idea of renouncing pleasure or the primary needs, must be seen within certain contexts or periods, therefore it is not normal in general and also its opposite does not mean just sinning, but deteriorating, weakening when failing to do certain exercises.
Peter Sloterdijk, an agnostic, speaks of this despiritualized asceticism, in the sense that we are a society of exercises, but that they do not provide either a human or spiritual elevation, a clear example of this is the number of academies that grow in the country and in many places of the world. world, another example is the demonstrations of virility as a human elevation, of course it is important to take care of health, but sometimes excessive exercise and medication do the opposite.
From the human point of view, what we experience is a decadence that goes from the moral to the religious, subjects so clear until recently, today they are seen as having almost absurd controversies to the point of the immoral being considered “normal” and “human” and the religious being identified with atrocities.
The series of humanitarian crises could not fail to affect the economy, these are not simple market crises, they are at the epicenter of wars and economic fallacies, it is not necessary to be an economist to see that simplistic formulas do not work at either extreme: the wild capitalism and socialism without freedom and without human quality.
It seems difficult to recognize what a true spirituality would be then, even with the principle of asceticism, which means human elevation in social relations and in the inherent dignity of every human being, in respect for nature and in the preservation of its benefits, in short, in the love of life .
Even for the concept of peace we go back in history, the pax Roman seems to be the principle for many wars, whatever the one that subdued “enemy” territories to declare peace, not even the eternal peace of contemporary idealism is claimed, although it also have limitations.
It is a harbinger of great tragedies, including war, what is hoped is that somehow forces that still have a human and spiritual background can interpose this contemporary reality and revert the dangerous situation that we all face and few work for its reversal (photo about Pulitzer Prize in 2023).
Visit to Rome, Counteroffensive and Pulitzer Prize
15
May
The week was all about Ukraine: a visit to Rome and the pope, advances in
Backhmut and photos from the war that drew attention when they won the Pulitzer Prize, the photos are shocking and perhaps say more than words, since today there is even incomprehensible rhetoric favor of war.
In the strategic plan, there is no Portuguese analyst Germano Almeida pointed out: “here in the West we are not yet aware of the plans, so there is a Ukrainian idea that this is just the beginning and nobody knows where in fact this counter-offensive can be launched because the Bakhmut’s question could be a first diversion maneuver [discussion] and the essential thing and the mass offensive could be elsewhere”, says Almeida.
The visit to Italy, in addition to the country’s already declared support, the visits to Italian President Sérgio Mattarela and with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, he also participated in a talk show on Italian TV, about the pope, all that is known is an agreement humanitarian assistance to refugees.
The images that won the prize also have a Brazilian on the list: Felipe Dana, from Rio de Janeiro, who filmed and photographed scenes from Bucha, the most cruel and violent massacre carried out by Russia in Ukraine (first photo below), it is worth remembering that the war was also from Vietnam had awards on the horrors there.
Some images from the 2023 Pulitzer Prize given to several Associated Press photographers, including the Brazilian, if words don´t move, maybe the images will.
Artificial intelligence and planning
26
Jan
We all want ideal and perfect situations, as Margaret Boden says, obviously this is not restricted
to AI, our daily lives, our travels and the future depend on this planning, simple voluntarism, or simple desire (it is fashionable to mentalize desires) do not solve any problem and most of the time cause anxiety and frustration.
In the case of computing, “planning enables the program – and/or the human user – to find out what actions have already been taken and why. The ‘why’ refers to the goal hierarchy: this action was performed to satisfy that prerequisite, to achieve such and such secondary goals” (Boden, 2020, p. 44), this in some computer program designs is called “requirements engineering”.
In the case of AI, there is both a “forward thread” and a “backward thread”, which explain and help the program to find solutions, for this there is also a hierarchy, there is also a hierarchy of tasks and the author adds that both planning as hierarchy was rejected by “roboticists” in the 1980s, and today it has been incorporated into the field.
There are several AI constraints that are not clearly exposed and that better explain what AI is, for example, “there are a lot of simplifying non-mathematical assumptions in AI that are generally not mentioned. One of them is the (tacit) hypothesis that problems can be defined without taking emotions into account” (Boden, 2020, p. 46) which is addressed in the next topic and whose subject is just initialized.
The artificial neural networks that greatly helped the development of AI are very different from semantic networks, since the latter are already developed from experience and human interaction and only after these topics is that Chapter 6 does the author ask the question about what is real Artificial Intelligence, like the key questions “Do they have egos, moral stance and free will? Would they be aware?” (Boden, 2020, p. 165), and this question we cannot escape without presenting some philosophical, theological or anthropological insight, perhaps an in-depth synthesis of the three would be more interesting.
The question in times of serious civilizing crisis is necessary a previous question: the human conscience what would it be? How do we treat it? The dictatorship of the same, the insensitive and the standardization of even thought leads us to a false impression that the machine can overtake us (the point of singularity).
BODEN, Margaret A. (2020) Inteligência Artificial: uma brevíssima introdução (Artificial Intelligence: a very brief introduction). Brazil, SP: Ed. UNESP.
Slap in the Oscar
31
Mar
I had decided not to comment on the best Oscars this year, first
because I don’t consider “Attack of the Dogs” as good a movie, as, for example, Dune and Don’t Look Up, not only for the plots, but mainly for the whole work, Dune ended up taking several well-deserved awards, but none of the major ones.
Will Smith’s slap on Chris Rock stole the show, but director Jane Campion’s best-director comment, in another event about Serene and Venus Williams: “you are wonderful, however, you don’t have to compete with men like me” , also went down badly and his prize lost some of its shine.
Shortly after the slap from Will Smith he would receive the award for best actor, he is a great actor, but it would be more grandiose if he waited for this moment to say about the role he played as the father of the Williams in defense of the family and would give a much greater blow. hard on Rock for making an unfortunate comment about Will’s wife Jada Pinkett’s hair loss.
A lot of people came out in defense of Rock, the newspapers say that his show now breaks box office records, and Will exposed Jada because they now seek to know about her life and her relationships, and just like her alopecia disease, in my opinion, the moment response to Chris Rock could be the statuette moment, and in this case I won’t comment on the merits, but the role of Denzel Washington in MacBeth’s Tragedy deserves to be highlighted.
Another comment is the best actress award, I went to see excerpts after the nomination (I didn’t see the whole movie) Tammy Faye’s eyes (picture), neither the movie nor the winning actress (Jessica Chastain) impress me, I know the Academy follows some cliches: irony, a certain humor and other tics.
I went to see the popularity, just over 60% of people liked the movie, I’m not out then.
I saw Meryl Streep’s performance in Don’t Look Up, and she at least deserved the nomination, of course she’s already won others, she’s a consecrated actress (Margaret Thatcher’s spectacular role in Iron Lady, for example), but merit is indisputable and not the height of the winner matters.
Will Smith’s slap and the fail an action from the Best Director winner (with Williams sisters) drew attention to a lackluster Oscar to the academy’s taste and the slap its a error only.
Don’t look up: between fiction and documentary
29
Dec
The Netflix film is a fiction, but the style has become similar to a
documentary, and different from other apocalyptic films (“Armageddon” (1998), “Deep Impact” (1998) and “A Friend Wanted for the End of the World ” (2012)) the film “Don’t look up” has a different impact due to the apocalyptic waves that find the public.
The film tells of a professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his astronomy student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) make the discovery of a comet with a short time to collide with the earth, six months, and want to make it. drawing attention from the media that prefers to direct the public to social media media and is little concerned about their own lives, any resemblance to the pandemic is not a mere coincidence, there is a correlation, in particular, of feelings and attitudes.
Things start to change when Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) organizes a media tour to the office of President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her son Jason (JOnah Hill) and also with the help of the Daily Rip airwaves, a program morning hosted by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry) and a race against time begins.
In addition to the extraordinary actors, the film catches attention, and is already quoted for awards, the theme, but it is treated almost like a documentary and this is worrying.
The end-of-the-year messages are usually encouraging and almost always speak of hope for a better year, after two chaotic years due to the pandemic situation, the fiction film should have a fictional character as there are many films of the so-called “catastrophe cinema”, and people always watch it understanding it’s a fiction, but the time and conspiracy theories can collaborate to a film that has a negative impact on the emotions of the viewer.
I remember the last one to watch in this style, which was the Norwegian film Earthquake (2018), in which geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) decides to investigate the Oslo tunnels, where a great earthquake occurred many years ago, and meets Marit (Katherine Thorborg Johansen) who is the daughter of a geologist who died while investigating the Oslo mines.
Both decide, with the imminence of a new earthquake, to save as many people as possible.
The problem is always how to avoid tragedy, of course if possible, so don’t get the vaccine is akin to “don’t look up”.
Both decide, with the imminence of a new earthquake, to save as many people as possible.
The hope should not start from the fact that a tragedy cannot happen, such as an extension or a new pandemic, but the preventive measures that can save, but “Don’t look up” seems more like despair than actually an attempt to avoid further catastrophes, will give you something to talk about.
The night of culture and humanism
19
Oct
Edgar Morin considers contemporary culture something broader
than what is considered and was theorized as mass culture, for him it goes beyond media culture, which is in full decline, despite reactions from the art world in some segments, in general it deals with death, the dark and contempt for symbols, values, myths and images related to everyday life and the collective imagination, but regional, religious and humanist cultures persist in an act of resistance.
The industrial process and the success of performance and productivist values hide what is processed in the spirit, something Morin calls “industrialization of the spirit”, this second colonization is not processed horizontally conquering territories, but vertically penetrating the human soul and obscuring it.
The cultural industry has set in motion a third culture (in addition to classical and natural, I would call original), but there is a human resistance that comes from the original culture of each people and each specific culture, but the idea of colonizing is alive.
The multicultural realities present in mass culture are not autonomous, so the idea is to demolish (or erase) the institutions that can resist this new “colonization”, and resistance can only arise from the cultures of peoples, from their original development of culture and its religions and beliefs.
Although one can criticize the current media culture, social networks are a ties between actors that can be made through them, it does not find a society devoid of culture to be omnipresent, it contains social values and symbols, beliefs and ideologies , and in them the transcendental factors are still impregnated, it is not a separate culture.
In Morin’s view, mass culture integrates and disintegrates at the same time in a polycultural reality, it makes contain, control, censor (also in many cases by the state and by the churches) tending to corrode and disintegrate other cultures.
It is now a cosmopolitan and planetary culture, and it will constitute the first truly universal culture in the history of mankind, while conservative thought considers it plebeian barbarism, left-wing critics consider it an opiate of the people and deliberate mystification , and so the only perspective seems to be the authoritarian one.
In the authoritarian case, the state must control the production and distribution of “cultural goods”, while in the democratic case the large cultural groups must dictate the media controlling the production and distribution of content, here digital media is present.
Both currents agree in the criticism of mass culture, classifying it as a poor cultural product, of low aesthetic quality and without originality (kitsch).
The great solution pointed out by Morin is in the structure of the imaginary: the use of archetypes that order dreams, without the standardization of mythical and romance themes, art is a great reaction in this field, the cultural industry was reduced to archetypes and stereotypes, who outside of these there is no cultural “insertion”, and her prisons are individualized products.
It’s not about accepting diversity, but increasing consumption, just as it did with the pop culture of the 60s, movies, radio or TV shows (now lives and stories) are solely aimed at maximizing profit and audience (likes and fanpages).
In religious terms, syncretism is the most suitable word to translate the tendency to homogenize culture and dictate values and the comicity used to these themes plays the role of destroying its essence and originality, everything is similar or equal.
Children’s cultural content is invaded by themes of adult consumption: they are presented in a simplification that takes them (to adult viewers too) as children.
Even leisure is not just a way of allowing a balance of life, but it is invaded by mass culture, the so-called “resorts”, the beaches and leisure places are invaded by the “cultural industry”, everything within reach, just by an app.
This crisis is neither temporary nor fleeting, a great civilizing crisis may emerge from it, but it is necessary to have hope despite the public blindness.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX. (20th century mass culture). trad. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9ª. edição. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Forense.
Digital transformation beyond Buzzword
21
Oct
We alerted and problematized in the 10 years of this blog the
transformation that was being led by digital changes, social, educational, industrial and even behavioral aspects, most of the skeptics reacted, mocked or despised a real change that was happening.
The pandemic has shown that more than necessary tools can build bridges, establish new relationships, energize companies and avoid wasting time, money and especially in these times, endangering health.
Now everyone lives in the digital reality, companies have survived through online services, families, social groups, public services and meetings of various types depend on digital tools, shows depend on lives, meetings or posts on social media tools.
A buzzword emerged very strongly called the “digital transformation”, but the danger of opportunism is great for companies and sites that exploit and mystify these services and charge dearly for it, so some concepts are necessary, first what happens differently in generation Z of previous call of millennials, those who were born at the beginning of the millennium, therefore before the year 2000, which is now 22 to 37 years old.
The millenials followed the evolution of the Web (the pages, websites and blogs), they were born in a reality in which computers were an appliance, so they were only used at home and optionally at school, while generation Z through cell phones took the digital world to everywhere, create chat groups and behave differently with the credibility of websites, blogs and media networks, create their own relationships and idols, in general different from everything that is known.
Although more closed and with a tendency to have little social relationship, they are more critical than millennials, who are more anxious, more efficient and more demanding.
Thus, relations with the market are very different, they return to prefer shopping in physical stores and select well what they buy, less impulsive and already have the technology with excellent support, although very connected they already know the limits of technology.
Major economics magazines like Forbes and Fortune have done generation Z analyzes to understand the necessary market transformation, Forbes says it represents 25% of the current world population, digital is a natural part of their lives, like TV and the radio of past generations, while Fortune claims that 32 of generation Z are striving for a job of their dreams and rule out taking on any job, although temporarily accepted to lift the future.
Thus the old CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) do not work and many criticisms and analyzes made for the millennial generation are outdated.
According to Kasey Panetta, a researcher at Gartner, 5 new concepts are emerging: Composite architectures, agile and responsive architectures, Algorithmic trust, products, links, websites and reliable transactions, Beyond silicon, the limits of Moore’s law of the evolution of computers, now technologies smaller and more agile are sought, Formative Artificial Intelligence (AI) adaptation to the client, customization of services, times and location, and the Digital Me concept, a kind of passport to the digital world, tools and websites that already know the client and their needs, forms of behavior and preferences.
So the entire digital universe that seemed stable is also going to collapse and much of what is called “digital transformation” is just a digital mystification.
Panetta, Kasey. 5 Trends Drive the Gartner Hyper Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2020. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/5-trends-drive-the-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2020, Access: September 15, 2020
