Connected Unplugged

Reading ‘Connection in Visibility (pdf)‘ .. I basically got attracted by the article headline’s focus on visibilty and still am interested in a few points mentioned here. Especially the relation of an increasing visibility in public life through mainly invisble technological developments call for a rethinking of the paradoxes of many of our everyday life habits and opinions. Excerpts like ‘to join with other without knowing them’ get a different undertone these days I think, and may also ask to rethink possibilities of ways of flow less related to commerce and military …
In this sense Eric Kluitenberg’s article, which sums up in ‘Connected Unplugged’ on NOEMA (don’t be irritated) offers some aspects to re-evaluate the isolation created through self-centered connectivity ….. and to define use and hybrid spaces differently … and eventually more collectively…
And still surprisingly apt is a quote of Castells mentioned in the text:

“…people still live in places. But because function and power in our society are organised in the space of flows, the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places. Experience, by being related to places, becomes abstracted from power, and meaning is increasingly separated from knowledge. It follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society.
The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of a networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes. Unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately built between those two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace.”
[Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, Malden (Mass.), 1996, p. 428]
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