Monday, 17 October 2016

Patrice Flichy

I appreciate Flichy questioning why those involved in generating the internet and those who have since chosen to integrate it in their everyday lives chose this system that has separated themselves from the past.  

Recently while reading a book by Maury Kleins called “ The power Makers: Steam, Electricity and the men who invented Modern America”, I found it interesting how the author highlighted  the quirks of the people that invented vital building blocks of America.  The inventors lived by the motto of “ building the world of tomorrow” but were often criticized for their technological hopes.  In the article by Flichy  he analyzed the historical parts that founded the social conditions brought on by the widespread of communication technology, specifically the representations of technical systems conveying the experiments  and dreams of the inventors and users that developed around information technology. Jill Lepore from the New Yorker wrote an article reviewing Maury Kleins book that I think some of you may find interesting: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/our-own-devices  Not only does this article provide a book review but it connects the book to challenge the long theoretical perspective  of technological determinism, reminiscing on her first encounter with  a TRS-80 Micro Computer System, she states that she couldn’t imagine the next step, most saw it as a cross between a television and a cassette recorder.  Lepore writes :

“The challenge, in this case, would be to write a history that can explain both what we thought then and what we know now. A method that ignores our it-looks-like-a-television response will make it seem as if the information age were inevitable, headlong, and unstoppable (which might even be true) but will fail to prove it.”

Similarly, Flichy wrote about two fields that are key to the new technology in the Western society. As discussed in class, the fields are the utopias(ideologies) and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. The experimentation process is in the cross hairs of a utopian and imaginaries. The inventor and the users continually work towards a utopian, there can be different ideologies that share a common imaginary.  Every social imaginary has this utopian, Flichy asks why society disrupted tradition , Lepore, however, says that the new era of information technology was inevitable. Through ideology and imaginary, Flichy analyzes how  what is possible  and what exists ,  is structured. 

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