Salsa tecnologica
Technological salsa
May 6th, 2008 by Ivo | 
Email This Post
| Permalink
Joseph Weizenbaum, who died recently, had documented in the 1970s in Computer Power and Human Reason (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976) the natures of compulsive programmers, disinterested in their bodily needs and detached from the world around them.
Such figures are come across in a market economy country where advanced technologies are part of everyday life, and we don’t pay much attention to them.
The famous McLuhan phrase, “The medium is the message,” and before this the Taoist affirmations according to which the use of instruments transforms us into them had never seemed as self-evident to me as in Cuba some years ago.
I was in a small town and used to connect to the Internet from one of the few places where some computers were available, which were almost as obsolete as their pre-revolution cars. A couple of technicians managed the computers and worked for the installation and maintenance of the network.
The Cubans are lively people on average, with a direct human contact, sensual people, related to the reality of the “here and now.” It was striking to see these technicians, on the contrary, detached, immersed in their own worlds, neglecting themselves, silent, with short “digital” answers. One could imagine that such people already had such personalities and consequently looked for compatible occupations. Without getting into the conundrum of whether the chicken or the egg came first, there is probably a mutual feedback between personality and life choices, but doubtlessly technology also shapes our psyches.
It is peculiar to realize how the modalities of thoughts received from a medium – which in this case was a computer and programming – can have more importance on the sociality and (partially) on a man’s personality than the collective conditioning received from his own society. It is equally surprising to see how the history and culture of a country which shapes the collective soul and the modalities of interaction between people get rewritten by daily contact with a tool which has existed for only a few years.
tanti baci bibi
