Just a quick note to point out a very good paper (actually a keynote address) given this past January by one of my former supervisors at the University of Edinburgh. "Reality Check: From Culture and Difference to Possession and Dispossession" by Angela Dimitrakaki should be a very good read for those who are more interested in the political and labour aspects of the contemporary museum, and also gives a few interesting pointers toward possible best practises in a global context. Highly reccomended.
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Saturday, April 4, 2015
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Who is "We"?
I have recently begun sifting through the AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015, a document published by Acciòn Cultural Española which endeavours to illustrate, through key concept selected by professionals in the field, technological innovations that will change, within the near future, the way museums work - particular attention being paid to the Internet as the context for such emergent models. While the think-tank behind the project is markedly Spanish in scope, the report does not concern itself with Spanish museums only, and remains rather general in its potential geographical area of application.
The report is quite long and varied, touching on a number of very disparate topics sometimes only tangential to museums: a review of the whole thing would be, therefore, daunting and probably useless once all is said and done. What I would like to comment on is the opening article, written by E-commerce expert Rodolfo Carpintier Santana, titled 'Challenges of the twenty-first century. How to adapt a company to the twenty-first century'. The article is actually rather philosophical and general in scope, arguing for certain paradigmatic innovations that, should we play along with them instead of resisting them, will lead us toward an utopian state of perfect coincidence between human needs and technology akin to a post-scarcity 'singularity' (p.16).
Throughout the article, Santana keeps referring back to an unspecified, vaguely perceived 'we' as the subject who will undertake, experience, and reap the benefits of a smart technology serving our every need at little or no cost. I have seen similar use of the pronoun in other techno-utopian pieces of writing, and I always found it highly dubious. After all, if all the new technologies Santana and the AC/E report talk about will change 'our' lives radically, it is not trivial to define who 'we' is: who will exactly put the work for technoutopia to happen? who will reap the benefits? who will be excluded? To me one of the greatest limits of technoutopian thinking is how it systematically pushes to the wayside the uncomfortable truth that, likely, the 'we' it envisions will constitute a very, very small fraction of the global human population. This is an issue that is particularly close to my research into paradigms of online museum - visitor interaction; and that in Santana's article coexists in addition to the 'usual' hallmarks of techno -utopianism, such as: the projection of every problem's solution into a near future which is visible, yet still out of reach; the millennial-like hype for a 'new age' of peace and concord; the positivist faith in best case scenarios as the implicitly inevitable outcome.
On page 15, Santana enumerates some of the new marvels the Internet-integrated technoutopia will bring us, including but not limited to 3d workshops capable of producing more or less anything on demand; smart home appliances; health services 'on the fly' thanks to chip implants and 24/7 remote monitoring. In the words of the author, 'we will soon see...' and 'we will have...' (p.15). But who is 'we'? The sweatshop worker who mined the elements necessary to the production of the chip? one of the hundreds of millions who do not have access to basic treatment in the wake of an Ebola epidemic? Considering that, so far, technologically driven progress has mostly contributed to global capital's marginalisation of large swathes of humanity to the provinces of Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000) it seems unlikely that technological development would suddenly become the solution to the divides it created itself (see Mardikyan et al, 2015, for a recent analysis).
Similarly, according to the author, we must also be ready to meet the challenges that the digital revolution will bring, including new production; business; and distribution models (p. 18). Yet, even in this case, does the 'other half' who gets by on a subsistence economy really have the surplus, and political option of engaging the economical and business issues of a digital it can't afford in the first place? (this is, hopefully, subject to change. See here for an interesting overview describing a few future scenarios).
My brief and far from exhaustive comments above should not be taken as a damnation of certain parts of the world into perpetual serfdom to global capital; neither should be taken as an attempt to enforce liberal guilt onto discourses that, once their eminently Western scope is acknowledged, are valid and important. I would like, however, to see more conscious and explicit efforts by techno- positivists to recognise that, by generalising one's target under the broad stroke of a pronoun, a great deal of political and social depth is lost - that very depth which many are actively attempting to wrestle off global capital's grasp. The same holds true, of course, for museum studies' 'them' and 'audiences', two other terms that could bear more ontological scrutiny.
The report is quite long and varied, touching on a number of very disparate topics sometimes only tangential to museums: a review of the whole thing would be, therefore, daunting and probably useless once all is said and done. What I would like to comment on is the opening article, written by E-commerce expert Rodolfo Carpintier Santana, titled 'Challenges of the twenty-first century. How to adapt a company to the twenty-first century'. The article is actually rather philosophical and general in scope, arguing for certain paradigmatic innovations that, should we play along with them instead of resisting them, will lead us toward an utopian state of perfect coincidence between human needs and technology akin to a post-scarcity 'singularity' (p.16).
Throughout the article, Santana keeps referring back to an unspecified, vaguely perceived 'we' as the subject who will undertake, experience, and reap the benefits of a smart technology serving our every need at little or no cost. I have seen similar use of the pronoun in other techno-utopian pieces of writing, and I always found it highly dubious. After all, if all the new technologies Santana and the AC/E report talk about will change 'our' lives radically, it is not trivial to define who 'we' is: who will exactly put the work for technoutopia to happen? who will reap the benefits? who will be excluded? To me one of the greatest limits of technoutopian thinking is how it systematically pushes to the wayside the uncomfortable truth that, likely, the 'we' it envisions will constitute a very, very small fraction of the global human population. This is an issue that is particularly close to my research into paradigms of online museum - visitor interaction; and that in Santana's article coexists in addition to the 'usual' hallmarks of techno -utopianism, such as: the projection of every problem's solution into a near future which is visible, yet still out of reach; the millennial-like hype for a 'new age' of peace and concord; the positivist faith in best case scenarios as the implicitly inevitable outcome.
On page 15, Santana enumerates some of the new marvels the Internet-integrated technoutopia will bring us, including but not limited to 3d workshops capable of producing more or less anything on demand; smart home appliances; health services 'on the fly' thanks to chip implants and 24/7 remote monitoring. In the words of the author, 'we will soon see...' and 'we will have...' (p.15). But who is 'we'? The sweatshop worker who mined the elements necessary to the production of the chip? one of the hundreds of millions who do not have access to basic treatment in the wake of an Ebola epidemic? Considering that, so far, technologically driven progress has mostly contributed to global capital's marginalisation of large swathes of humanity to the provinces of Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000) it seems unlikely that technological development would suddenly become the solution to the divides it created itself (see Mardikyan et al, 2015, for a recent analysis).
Similarly, according to the author, we must also be ready to meet the challenges that the digital revolution will bring, including new production; business; and distribution models (p. 18). Yet, even in this case, does the 'other half' who gets by on a subsistence economy really have the surplus, and political option of engaging the economical and business issues of a digital it can't afford in the first place? (this is, hopefully, subject to change. See here for an interesting overview describing a few future scenarios).
My brief and far from exhaustive comments above should not be taken as a damnation of certain parts of the world into perpetual serfdom to global capital; neither should be taken as an attempt to enforce liberal guilt onto discourses that, once their eminently Western scope is acknowledged, are valid and important. I would like, however, to see more conscious and explicit efforts by techno- positivists to recognise that, by generalising one's target under the broad stroke of a pronoun, a great deal of political and social depth is lost - that very depth which many are actively attempting to wrestle off global capital's grasp. The same holds true, of course, for museum studies' 'them' and 'audiences', two other terms that could bear more ontological scrutiny.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Mardikyan, Sona, et al. "Examining the Global Digital Divide: A Cross-Country Analysis." (2015).
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