Appunti Inglese

WEC COVER

The whole earth catalogue was a seminal publication of the countercultural era, founded by

Stewart Brand in 1968. It was a compendium of products for sale that enlisted all sorts of items, for

a self-sustainable and useful lifestyle.

According to professor Turner the WEC reflected the intertwining to legacies: military industrial

research culture and a particular wing of American counterculture (new communalist who turned

away from political action and toward technology and transformation of consciousness as the

primary source of social change, go back to the land to create egalitarian communities, society can

be seen as an interconnected system). The cover of wec is a multimodal cluster, that shows this

shift from de-humanized cold war attitude to a globally interconnected natural afflatus. The

message of Stewart Brand is that the attention of mankind should be turned to the earth because

our planet is an interconnected system.

The cover features a total black setting, which enhances the hyper-real image of our planet, made

salient through its exagerated size. The images realizes a symbolic visual act, because it

represents the world in terms of general truths. The visual concept of globality is recalled at verbal

level by the adjective “whole”, a marker of cybernetic rhetoric of system and information here

applied to personal and social empowerment and not central control. The subtitle “access to tools”

is used as a metaphor that express access to knowledge. In the purpose we can find traces of the

gnostic message of apple’s logo and its connection with the new communalists politics of

consciousness. “we are as gods and might as well get used to it” “we are as gods” reminds the

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Bible, in particular the Genesis when the snake convinces Eve to taste the fruit from the tree of the

knowledge. This expression mixes the divine attribute with the plural personal pronoun “we” to

democratize the biblical message. Government + big business + formal education + church: it’s a

negative connotation of the principal area of the establishment, politics, economy, education and

religion. Power and glory are associated to institutions in a negative relationship. The solution is a

“realm of intimate, personal power”: here Brand uses an high degree of certainty because

announces the coming of a power of individuals, the power to be free to decide about our lives,

without mediation. This is a power of every man to build his life on his own. It’s is a power that

doesn’t involve material aspects, but immaterial ones; indeed Brand talks about “education”

“inspiration” “environment” “adventure”. The author empathize the individual dimension using in

every clause the words “own/his”. So individual manages to change his life, especially in

immaterial aspects, thanks to technology that is a material tool.

Finally the catalogue presents itself as the tool to reach this self-conscious process of empowering,

it recalls the cover “access to tools”. In this text we can find traces of something that will come after

in time, the participatory culture theorized by Jenkins. The idea of man who changes and shapes

his life especially in mind thanks to technology to create a community is like the man of the XXI

century’s society, who participates online thanks to his skills because these skills deal with

technology (technology skills permit each man to participate online and to create a community).

HACKER CULTURE

They were exponents of the counterculture and engineers of military industrial research. They

created a new language, giving inputs to the computers.

Hacker ethics was based on:

- total and unlimited access (to computer)

- all information should be free (transparency)

- libertarian stance and the idea spreading in horizontal structure (many to many)

- Meritocratic system ( Equal opportunity)

- you can create art and beauty on a computer (pleasure)

- computer can change your life for the better ( politics of consciousness )

In 1984 there was the first hacker conference that was an important step to popularization informal

attitude (passion, fun ..) becomes familiar and influenced USA politics. The 3 most important

elements of hacker culture are: Passionate – Playful – Claverness.

PARTECIPATORY CULTURE

Participatory Culture finds its origins in the 19 century, outside the digital world; In fact we can find

one of the first forms of expression of this culture in the emergence of the Ameteur Press

Association that was a group of people that produced individual pages or magazines that were

send to a “central mailer” for collection and distribution to all members of the group. This way of

working recalls the use of the modern social media like Wikipedia or Youtube. The increasing

access to Internet has played a crucial role in the expansion of the P.C. and for this reason

becomes important to consider how New Spaces can leverage Web 2.0 technologies to create a

sociotechnical P.C. in which members feel empowered to engage and participate. In 2006

H.Jenkins defines P.C. as a culture in which private individuals (the public) do not act as

consumers only, but also as contributors or producers. Moreover, he introduces the 5 key

characteristics that describe the P.C. framework: -Relatively low barriers for engagement; -Strong

support for sharing creation with others; -Informal Mentorship; -Members believe their contribution

matter; -Care about others opinions of self&work. Additionally P.C. has been considered by some

as a way to reform communication and to improve the quality of media; in this direction Jenkins

highlight that young people become active social agents with more power in their hands than any

previous generations and also affirms that “with great power, comes great responsibility”. In 2010

Jenkins was a “teds talk show” to speak about two main concept of the P.C. : “New Media Literacy”

and “civic engagement”. About the first one, it’s a repertoire of competence that enable people to

use new media’s instruments to become engaged citizen. Be an engaged citizen means to share

ideas in communities of peers, to share values, passion and practices, to express own public

participation. Thanks to Globalization and technologization this phenomenon became mainstream

and promote the connection/ exchange. In the recent years the debate is shift to the Participatory

Media.

COUNTER CULTURE

U.S. Counter Culture is divided in 2 different areas about the role of technology:

- New Left: in this case the technology reduce people’s power and so they see technology as an

oppression that is able to de-humanize people and make it as slavers. They struggled through

public demonstrations for civil rights.

- Back to Lander: Bettern Known as New Communalist, in their view technologies are tools to help

people to become free, this process is possible through the use of technology because it can help

people to improve their knowledge. They thought that if you change yourself you can change the

world (Politics of Consciousness); in this direction they left the cities and returned to community

where they could stay in touch with natural right. It was a community of peers, who saw the society

as a system of interconnections.

CYBER SPACE

It is an immaterial space in which the people are interconnected with others (new home of mind).

So every people has the right and the duty to receive and transmit informations, only in this case

we have a real/direct democracy. It’s socio-political space and government don’t and can’t govern

it. It’s directly given by God and created by action of the people in a peer to peer relationship.

Cyberspace is a: TRANSLATION (economic element = market place); RELATIONSHIP (social

aspects, to become a citizen); THOUGHT (mind, gnostic idea); MORAL DIMENSION (ethical

stance, people with public identity who share a common system of values=reciprocity)

CLINTON

This is an abstract from the Hilary Clinton’s speech “The five freedom speech”. Clinton pronounced

that speech while she was the secretary of the state during the first Obama mandate (January

2010). The main concept is the idea that the developing of digital technology will became a tools

for the USA.

We can find this idea in three different concepts:

- Human right

- Cold war frame

- Participatory culture st

the idea of human right is realizes by intertextuality. In fact Clinton quotes three texts: the 1

amendment of USA Constitution, the second one is the universal declaration of human rights, the

third is the four freedom speech by Roosvelt. All the text linked to the same area of ambiguity:

“universality VS americaness”. We can find the same ambiguity in the digital technologies: global

platforms VS USA platforms. The ambiguity is that global platforms are in the fact USA platforms.

Moreover Clinton quotes Roosvelt and she adds the fifth freedom: the freedom to connect. This is

an heteroglossia.

in this fifth freedom we can find the frame of participatory culture, because this freedom gives

equal access to knowledge. The participatory culture also emerges by the use of the parallelism

between “viral video” and “samizdat”. The samizdat was a group of dissident activity across the

Soviet bloc, in favour of freedom. This group reproduced censured documents and passed its from

reader to reader. Hilary Clinton with the phrase “Beyond this partition, viral video and blog posts

are the Samizdat of our day” wants to say that people creating viral video are supporting the

libertarian values and democracy fighting against tyranny, using social media you’re in favour of

liberty because you are supporting a view of the world.

At the and we can find another contrast between “barriers” VS “global network”. In fact the term

“electronic barriers” is functional to explicate this contrastive rhetoric, used to reframe the cold war

rhetoric, linked to the term “barriers” in the actual context (digital world).

Moreover the term “iron curtain” is an heteroglossia with Churchill speech’s “Iron Curtain”.

In this text the digital technology are considered as a natural right, and the American people have

the moral duty to defend this right. In this case the cold war frame is readapted in our century in a

possible “Cyber war”.

GNOSTICISM

The gnostic idea is based on the celebration of knowledge. According to this idea mind is superior

to what is material and there is a triumph of immateriality. In a modern view the Cyberspace is

superior to the rest of the world, because is a new house of the minds.

CYBERNETIC

Wiener funded the idea of cybernetic. He believes in the exchange between man and machines

and that the relationship between this make possible a dialogue between different branches of

knowledge. Moreover th