After the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution in the history of mankind, the information revolution happened in the twentieth century. Now we live in the information society, where information technology, such as computer and the internet, plays the most important role. In the information society the philosophy of information arose. In the field of the information philosophy, there are many complex philosophical problems ahead of philosophers, one of which is symbolic alienation, or information alienation. In order to simplify the problem, in this essay “information alienation” is a synonym of “symbolic alienation” due to the fact that information is indissolubly linked with symbol.

The so-called alienation means that people do something like lifting a rock only to drop it on their own feet, just as a Chinese proverb says.  

As a complex phenomenon, alienation appeared in the early period of civilization. Li Zehou, a famous Chinese philosopher, pointed out that Zhuang Zi was the first philosopher in the history of philosophy to study alienation [1]. In the Period of Warring States (475-221 B.C.) in China, as a Taoist philosopher, Zhuang Zi became aware of the nature of alienation and analyzed this kind of phenomenon. In Section Twelve of Zhuang Zi, Haven and Earth, the author made up an edifying story about “Zhu-kung traveled south to Chu” to expose the essence of alienation[2], in spite of the fact that Zhuang Zi did not use the term alienation.

In Europe, Hegel advanced a theory of alienation and after Hegel Marx advanced another kind of theory of alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844[3]. Different from Zhuang Zi who investigated and criticized the alienation that happened in the agricultural society, Marx investigated and criticized the alienation that happened in the industrial society.

Is it possible that as a kind of phenomenon alienation be wiped out in the society?

On the eve of the information revolution, some scholars, especially some futurologists, for instance, Alvin Toffler, described a new form of society from an optimistic point of view and showed an alluring prospect in the information society. According to what these futurologists said, information technology would not be a double-edged sword. However, when having entered on the information age, people found that the new information technology also turned out to be a double-edged sword.

In the information society, people unexpectedly witnessed the negative side of information technology, such as computer crime, internet defraud, internet addiction, etc. From the philosophical point of view, the fact that the new information technology unavoidably leads to many bad consequences gives philosophers a hint that a new kind of alienation has appeared in the information society. This new kind of alienation can be referred to as information alienation or symbolic alienation.

Alienation, which has become a more and more serious social problem since the Industrial Revolution, can be expressed itself in various forms.

Norbert Wiener says, "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day"[4]. This aphorism suggests that information should not be confused with matter. Based on this thesis, we can come to a conclusion that there are at least two kinds of alienation, matter alienation (material product alienation) and information alienation (symbolic alienation). The former is the principal form of alienation in the industrial society and the latter is the principal form of alienation in the information society.

Matter alienation is an old problem. However, information alienation is a new problem. It is certain that information alienation or symbolic alienation is one of the major themes in the field of information philosophy.

On the one hand, we must accept that matter alienation and symbolic alienation share a lot in common. On the other hand, we must pay attention to many differences between matter alienation and symbolic alienation, especially differences in their causes and characteristics.

In regard to the cause and characteristics of labor alienation and machine alienation, which fall into the same category, matter alienation, in the first volume of Capital, Marx pointed out that it is not machinery itself but the capitalist employment on machinery that results in alienation [5].

However, in the information society, the situation changed a lot. Although the danger of matter alienation, as a kind of social phenomenon, is lessened to a certain degree, the danger of information alienation, as another kind of social phenomenon, increases to a high degree.

In the information society, various phenomena which result from symbolic alienation or information alienation, such as network fraud and hacking, frequently crop up.

The cause and characteristics of information alienation is different from that of matter alienation. While matter alienation results often from actual materials, information alienation results often from false information.

To make a long story short, the basic difference between matter alienation and information alienation is that the information alienation or symbolic alienation relates to the true and false question, especially to false information, while the matter alienation or material product alienation relates to real problems in the society. For example, when conducting research on (matter) alienation in the industrial society, Marx investigated the actual social phenomena happened in the society, while when conducting research on information alienation, scholars in information society often have to investigate the influence and consequence of false information.

In the field of philosophy, Francis Bacon’s theory of the idols, especially the idols of market place, touched upon information alienation in essence. In the field of information philosophy, scholars should carry the research on information alienation to a new stage.

References

1. Li, Zehou. 1985. Research on ancient Chinese Intellectual History. Beijing: People's Publishing House. P.179.
2. Zhuang Tzu. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, Translated by Burton Watson. http://www.coldbacon.com/chuang/chuang.html
3. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf
4. Wiener, Norbert. 1965. Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: The MIT Press. p.132.
5. Marx, Karl. Capital (vol.Ⅰ). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm (20 of 56) [23/08/2000 16:18:06]

1. Introduction

Digital languages and instruments are not only powerful tools for simplifying and enhancing the work of humanists and social scientists, they also create new cultural representations and self-representations that transform both the epistemology and the practice of research.

In particular, digital representations can influence and shape our cultural artefacts and everyday experiences in various ways. For example, we are influenced in the way we represent everyday digital objects, such as the Windows folder as a metaphor for ‘document box’. This is at the level of the interfaces that ‘produce users through benign interactions […]. That is, as ideology create subjects, interactive and seemingly real-time interfaces create users who believe they are the “source” of the computer’s action’ (Chun 2011: 66-68). We are also influenced by the ways in which we write software or encode a document through specific languages (e.g.  Python or HTML). However, it is easy to demonstrate that such a distinction is artificial (and often damaging). From a semiotic point of view, both representations (visible interface and invisible coding) are ‘modelling systems’ (Uspenskij et al. 1973) that cast their influence on overlapping political, social, cognitive and epistemological domains. In the first case we are talking about an influence mainly on practices and processes (social and cognitive dimensions), and in the second case we are dealing with the theory and interpretation of information structures (linguistic, hermeneutical and epistemological dimensions).

In our paper we will focus on this second aspect, and show some examples of how code and encodings are shaping the way we conceive and practise the work of reconstruction, conservation and representation of information structures and cultural artefacts. To this aim, we will discuss three encoding tools widely used in the Humanities and Social Sciences communities: HTML, the de facto standard for encoding World Wide Web documents and pages, Unicode, an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers, and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which defines a set of rules for encoding documents.

2. HTML War

The evolution of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as a structural language and application standard of the World Wide Web has been largely shaped by forces outside of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international community assembled by Tim Berners-Lee ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web.’ (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/)

Even before it became a W3C Recommendation on October 28, 2014, HTML5 had already reached in 2009 the status of a de facto standard on the Web. This was promoted and encouraged by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), a community established by Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software (joined later by Google) that was in open opposition to the development of the language of the Web as envisioned by the W3C and ‘concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors.’ (https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What_is_the_WHATWG.3F)

As in the days of the browser wars between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer (Sordi 2010), tensions collide (and versions are released) around the code of the World Wide Web that appear to be inspired by benefits for the authors and the users of the Web, but in in fact were tied to strategies to control a market that Web 2.0 apps, social media and the eternal promise of the Semantic Web have once again enhanced (Zeldman - Marcotte 2010).

Controlling the development of HTML means controlling the competition between the different software used to access the Web (Ford 2014); managing the scheduling and release of mobile applications that can now compete at the same level as desktop applications, without being forced to adopt or implement competing solutions; and to determine how texts and information on the Web can be searched and placed interrelated, making the definitive migration from a Web based on document search to a system for collecting user data. In other words, behind the HTML war there is a growing obsession by industry and governments with our digital traces, habits and personal information (Lyon – Bauman 2013; Bowker 2013).

A markup language permits us to formally describe the structure of a text, and to analyse the data in depth. Its utility will be in proportion to how much information it can set out, include and preserve. The word ‘markup’ itself shows its original bias: ironically, like other computing languages, XML is one the most faithful successors to the Gutenberg model; its basic aim is to imitate and preserve structured information as laid out in modern printed books. But is hierarchical and structured information an inherent and universal feature of texts (let alone writing)? The bias inherited from print has forced us to think of a text as a stable product, but if we either look at the different historical representations of a given text or at its documented writing stages, it is clear that there is not one text, but as many different texts as there are mechanisms of writing, material production, intertextual paths and methodologies of reconstruction (Fiormonte – Schmidt – Martiradonna 2010). Not only there is a potential conflict between the linear and hierarchical nature of current markup languages, and the intrinsic dynamic nature of the writing process, current text encoding tools and methodologies seems to constitute the most serious obstacle to the development of an independent theory of digital text.

A typical example of the overlapping between geopolitical settings and technical choices can be found in organisations like the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), an international consortium that defines guidelines for encoding cultural heritage documents in XML. However, the practice of defining encoding standards to allow electronic documents to be processed ultimately by shared software at the presentation level, does not work nearly as well for the encoding of historical primary sources (Schmidt 2014). Attempts to declare ‘standard’ names for textual features overlook significant variations in the interpretation, selection and application of those codes by different groups, individuals and cultures. Once again, the ‘practice’ of code is the result of the ‘theory’ reflected by certain groups and interests. Encoding tools and methodologies become examples of ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu 1984) used by the TEI community to  export a universalising, western-centric approach to the representation of cultural artefacts.

4. Universalizing the typography: Unicode  

The Unicode standard aims at constituting a universal and inclusive mapping of all graphemes from existing and past writing systems. Yet, some assumptions that underlie the standard are shaped by the culture-specific standardisation of the graphical representation of language generated by Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type printing.

The Unicode writing system, now forced upon all scripts, is based on a discrete ordered sequence of individual characters flowing only in one direction and dimension. However, in many writing systems based on handwriting, including contemporary Arabic and some Indic scripts, some graphemes ‘orbit’ around a central grapheme and can be written not only after (left or right, depending on the main direction of the script), but also before, above or under the ‘main’ grapheme. This is the case of ancient Greek ‘hypogegrammenon (subscribed) iota’, written before another vowel if lowercase, but after that vowel if uppercase. A wider case study is provided by the right-to-left Indic scripts where some vowels, although pronounced after a consonant, may be written before it (The Unicode Consortium 2014, chapter 12.1; Perri 2009; Constable 2001, II, par. 6.3).

Another assumption underlying the Unicode model is a one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme. The European medieval handwriting conventions based on the Greek or Latin alphabets are an interesting case study in this respect: ligatures, brevigraphs (sometimes represented by apparent diacritics such as macrons) and logographs are systematic and ‘regular’ here, and the underlying model is incompatible with the Unicode/Gutenberg one-to-one correspondence between a phoneme and a character in a linear sequence. However, the XML/TEI Guidelines for the transcription of pre-modern primary sources simply recommend the use of Unicode for this purpose (TEI P5 Guidelines, chapter 5).

In all these cases, the current version of Unicode imposes the Gutenberg model (based on the Latin alphabet used in Europe in the Modern Age) upon writing systems based on different models, and all discrepancies are treated as ‘exceptions’ to be dealt with at the presentational rendering level through software workarounds.

5. Conclusions

These case studies show that digital ‘standards’ always reflect a cultural bias (Carey 2009), and that the level of encoding is never neutral, but tends to assume (and overlap with) universalising discourses that are usually invisible at the surface of technology (Galloway 2012).

Digital Universalism (Chan 2014) is deeply intertwined with the question of language, which in its turn controls our encoding practices. Code imperialism and linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 2009) are two sides of the same coin. We are facing a codex universalis, based on the English lingua franca, used to articulate and exert a power of  standardisation and control.

But codes and encoding(s) before or along ‘semiotic’, ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘cultural’ are also political phenomena.  Looking at boards, offices and steering committees reveals that consortia, associations and organisations like Unicode, ICANN , TEI or the W3C are informed by Anglophone hegemonies, and their decisions are shaped by their commercial interests, ideologies and cultures. So apparently ‘neutral’, ‘technical’ decisions, as can be observed in Unicode, TEI or other organisations, tend to oversimplify and standardise the complex diversity of languages and cultural artefacts.

As Friedrich Kittler put it: ‘Codes—by name and by matter—are what determine us today, and what we must articulate if only to avoid disappearing under them completely. … Today, technology puts code into the practice of realities, that is to say: it encodes the world’ (Kittler 2008: 40).  So, is it still in our power to code (encode reality), or rather is code imposing on us its biases and constraints?

Ali, Mustafa (2014). “Towards a decolonial computing”, CEPE 2013: Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry, 1-3 July 2013, Lisbon, Portugal, International Society of Ethics and Information Technology, pp. 28–35.

Bauman, Zygmunt and Lyon, David (2013). Liquid Surveillance. A Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bowker, Geoffrey Y. (2013). “Data Flakes: an afterword to ‘Raw Data’ is an oxymoron”. In Gitelman, Lisa (ed.) ‘Raw Data’ is an oxymoron.  Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, pp. 167-171.

Carey, James W. (2009). Communication as Culture. Essays on Media and Society, Revised Edition. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

Chan, Anita S. (2014). Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Constable, Peter G. (2001). Understanding Unicode: a general introduction to the Unicode Standard. NRSI: Computers & Writing, 2001 (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=IWS-Chapter04b).

Fiormonte, Domenico, Martiradonna, Valentina, Schmidt, Desmond (2010). “Digital Encoding as a Hermeneutic and Semiotic Act: The Case of Valerio Magrelli”, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol. 4, N. 1 (http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000082/000082.html).

Ford, Paul (2014). “On HTML5 and the Group That Rules the Web”, The New Yorker, November 20, 2014, (http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/group-rules-web).

Galloway, Alexander R. (2012). The interface effect. London: Polity Press.

Kittler, Friedrich (2008). “Code (or, How You Can Write Something Differently)”, in Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, pp. 40-47.

Perri, Antonio (2009). “Al di là della tecnologia, la scrittura. Il caso Unicode”, Annali dell’Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Vol. II, pp. 725-748.

Phillipson, Robert (2009). Linguistic imperialism continued. New York and London: Routledge.

Schmidt, Desmond (2014).  “Towards an Interoperable Digital Scholarly Edition”, Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 7 (http://jtei.revues.org/979).

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TEI Consortium, eds. (2007). TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, TEI Consortium (http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/, last retrieved: February 27, 2015).

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Uspenskij, Boris Andreevich; Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich; Piatigorskij, Alexander; Lotman, Juri M. (1973). “Tezisy k semiotičeskomu izučeniju kul’tur (v primenenii k slavjanskim tektstam)”, in M. R. Mayenowa (ed.), Semiotyka i Struktura Tekstu. Studia święcone VII międz. Kongresowi Slawistów, Warszawa, pp. 9-32. Trad. en. “Theses on the Semiotic Studies of Culture (As applied to Slavic Texts)”, in Jan van der Eng and Mojmír Grygar (eds.), Structure of texts and semiotics of culture, The Hague: Mouton, 1973, pp. 1-28.

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Introduction

Communication is fundamental in marketing. Pinske and Dommisse (2009) have highlighted that it is essential for consumers because they need to be informed about the benefits sprung by their responsible choices in terms of purchases; moreover it is important to improve a company’s reputation (Bronn and Vrioni, 2011; Mark-Herbert and Von Schantz, 2007). For this reason sustainability report, considering its communicational function, can be deemed also a tool for marketers.

According to Lozano and Huisingh (2001) sustainability report “is a voluntary activity with two general purposes: (1) to assess the current state of an organisation’s economic, environmental and social dimensions, and (2) to communicate a company’s efforts and Sustainability progress to their stakeholders. However, these purposes do not consider the time dimension, nor the interactions among the different sustainability dimensions”. Obviously companies can choose between two ways: transparency, showing real data, or greenwashing, masking their real attitude and relying on appearance, with risks for reputation and boycott actions (Glazer, Kanniainen and Poutvaara, 2010).

This research is focused on the oil sector, characterized by different sustainability problems, both in an environmental and a social perspective.

Methods

In order to highlight this issue in the oil sector, a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2009) has been applied. Two of the largest oil company have been chosen, BP and Eni. These companies draft a sustainability report, providing a lot of data and information about their attention to safeguard the environment and to have also a positive impact on society. In this study researchers have compared these two cases, spotlighting the controversies which sometimes are stressed in the public opinion. Researchers have analyzed these two companies reports and then they have compared the information gathered from this document to their image.

Results and Discussion

The analysis of these companies’ sustainability report has pointed out a deep commitment to protect environment and also to be responsible from a social point of view. In the following table, for example, there is the list of some of the indicators used in Eni’s report.

Table 1. Some of the sustainability indicators used by Eni.

Area // Main indicators

People // Training hours on safety, Safety expenditures, OHSAS 18001 certifications, Health and Hygiene expenditures, Employees (total), Employees (women), Women senior managers, Satisfaction of participants.
Environment // ISO 14001 certifications, ISO 50001 certifications, EMAS registrations, Total systems audit, External certifications bodies, Environmental expenditures, CO2 emissions, Indirect CO2 emissions from sales of products, Net consumption of primary resources, Nitrogen Oxide emissions, Sulphur Oxide emissions, Total water used, Total recycled or reused water, Waste from reclamation activities, Waste management expenditures.
Local development // Total spending for the territory, Interventions on the territories from agreements, conventions and PSA by category.
Stakeholders // Eni customer satisfaction score, Suppliers used, Overall distributed net added value.
Ethics // Presence of women on the Board of Directors of Eni Group companies, Hours of training on human rights, Suppliers subjected to qualification procedures including screening on human rights, SA8000 audits carried out.
Innovation // R & D expenditures net of general and administrative costs, Personnel employed in R & D activities.

In spite of this, this company has been accused to produce pollution in Nigeria, causing health problems for the local communities, but also to be irresponsible with workers. Also BP presents a report full of information about its sustainable initiatives but, at the same time, it has been found guilty because the damages created near the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Conclusions

The analyzed cases have shown that sustainability report can be important in a marketing communication strategy but, at the same time, it is not a guarantee of truth. This shows that it is not a perfect tool for communication: it is necessary to research the possible ways to integrate information about environment and society in the balance sheet. Another reflection is relative to the importance of communicating with transparency: greenwashing could represent a problem also from a marketing point of view because it implies the worsening of the company’s reputation.

References

1. Bronn, P.S.; Vrioni, A.B. Corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing: an overview. International Journal of Advertising 2011, 20, 207-222.
2. Glazer, A., Kanniainen, V., Poutvaara, P. Firms' ethics, consumer boycotts, and signalling.      European Journal of Political Economy 2010, 26, 340-350.
3. Lozano, R., Huisingh, D. Inter-linking issues and dimensions in sustainability reporting. Journal    of Cleaner Production 2011, 19, 99-107.
4. Mark-Herbert, C.; Von Schantz, C. Comunicating corporate social responsibility- Brand management. Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies 2007, 12, 4-11.
5. Pinske, J.; Dommisse, M. Overcoming barriers to sustainability: an explanation of residential builder's reluctance to adopt clean technologies. Business Strategy and the Environment 2009, 18, 515-527.
6. Yin, R.K. Case study research: design and methods. Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, USA, 2009.

Abstract 

The growth of internet access together with new developments in the field of information technology have transformed the way in which political activism and protest movements arise, expand and reverberate. The appropiation of technological instruments by extensive publics has contributed to the advent of distributed networks revolving around social protests that interwave shared webs of meaning, action and reflection. This article constructs a genealogy of the appropiation of IT for social causes, from the early stages of the Internet, the global solidarity network with the zapatistas in the nineties, the global justicie movement, to web 2.0 and the cycle of global action that erupted in 2011 with the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and occupy Wall Street in the US, among others.

Method

The present work is based on comprehensive research which consisted of studying and following closely the EZLN since 1994 in Chiapas where I lived for 6 years. All that time until now that I live in México City, I made qualitative research on zapatismo, on the global justice movement and on the uprisings in Spain in 2011 with the Indignad@s, and in México with the #YoSoy132. I used netography and I conducted fieldwork and interviews with activists. In this paper, I make reference to my own publications on the subject and an enormous amount of bibliographic and documentary material which I have gathered throughout the years.

Results and Discussion

Over the last two decades, social movements have developed experiences in linking up networks as well as in common reflections about the very impact of their collective action. One of the inaugural cases of the use of the Internet for a social cause was the spontaneous formation of an international network of solidarity with the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which burst onto the scene in Chiapas, Mexico, on January 1, 1994. At that time, cyberspace was still virgin territory —for example, the Mexican government did not open a Web site for the President’s Office until September 1996— and activists around the world put together a network that gave constant visibility to the defense of the rebel indigenous communities and exhibited great capability for decentralized action (Rovira, 2009). The Zapatista movement, conceived as a laboratory of “political otherness” capable of having worldwide impact and of breaking with Leftist orthodoxies, has been a source of inspiration for reticular and global justice struggles.

Thinking about considering the Internet not only as a means of communication, but a space for subversion ignited among artists and hackers right at the moment of the biggest upsurge of Zapatismo, and in close relation to the defense of the indigenous rebellion. This is how Ricardo Domínguez of Electronic Disturbance Theater explains it: “In ’97 the Zapatista struggle took off again. We wanted to do something electronic, and the Anonymous group in Italy got in touch and showed us the Netstrike they were already doing. We created FloodNet, a script that sends petitions to any page you want. The first action brought together 18,000 people in four hours” (Molist, 2002). The idea that the Internet was not just a means of communication, but a space for disruption is part of the call to “electronic civil disobedience” (Stefan Wray, 1998).

In 1999, when the anti-globalization or global justice movement broke onto the scene in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the networks had already matured. Independent press and video communicators created an information center, the Independent Media Center (IMC), or Indymedia, with an online virtual platform that would later be replicated in hundreds of places around the world. The “Indymedia Big Bang” presupposed a “epochal change in the form of public action and its documentation” (Hayek, 2002). Active, a software created in Australia by Matthew Arnison and expanded by other technicians, made it possible for anyone to send not only texts, but photos, video footage, and audio files. Communicative activism in all its splendor changed the slogan that until then had ruled the relationship of the social movements with the communications media to, “Don’t hate the media; be the media.”

On February 15, 2003, more than 10 million people marched in the world’s main cities against the war, answering the largest single simultaneous global call for mobilization ever. Nothing stopped the United States’ plans. With the military offensives against Iraq and Afghanistan, the overall frameworks that the social struggles appealed to, such as human rights or democracy, stopped being effective; it was precisely the world’s greatest power that trampled them in the name of the “war against terrorism.” Suffice it to mention the prisons in Guantánamo and Abu Graib… The “security” discourse devoured any appeal of a mobilized public. Post-Berlin-Wall capitalism abandoned the straitjacket of the promise of democracy and did as it pleased, unfettered. I think that that moment was the close of the cycle of the global justice movement.

It was around 2004 that Web 2.0 appeared: digital social networks and micro-blogging. It was a possibility for “autonomous construction of social networks controlled and guided by their users” (Castells, 2012: 221). Experiences like “fast mobs” or “smart mobs” came about (Lasen and Martínez, 2008); other authors talk about intelligent multitudes (Rheingold, 2004) or “the global crowd” (Bruck Morss, 2014). In Spain, between March 11 and March 14, 2004, something emblematic took place: through SMS mobile phone messages, the citizenry countered the media and government discourse attributing to ETA the attack on Madrid’s Atocha train station. The “mobilization” was so widespread that it changed the outcome of the elections in three days. Many other examples can be found worldwide: from Iran’s Green Revolution —regardless of its controversial forms— to Obama’s 2008 campaign and its use of social networks for an election.

In late 2010, Pentagon cables were disseminated by the Wikileaks cyber-activist group, and in 2013, Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. government global espionage through the NSA demonstrated that in the new technological age, the secrets of those in power are no longer safe —but neither are the freedoms of citizens. Over these years, the Anonymous network flowered in defense of Wikileaks and spread worldwide with its local variants, applying tactics of attacks against corporate and government Web sites, but also going out onto the streets wearing Guy Fawkes masks, making them a global icon.

That is when a new global cycle emerged, radically different from the global justice movement: much more local and national, but at the same time connected. Starting in 2011, the Arab rebellions began, followed by revolts in Southern Europe. These are urban insurgencies that challenge the power of the states. In many cases, participants massively occupied squares: the 15M and Plaza del Sol in Spain; Tahrir Square in Cairo; Qasba in Tunisia; in the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, Barheim; in Greece’s Sintagma Square; and on Telaviv’s Rothschild Boulevard against hikes in housing costs. The occupation of Wall Street in New York spread to 1,000 cities of the United States in 2011. In Mexico, thousands of young people poured onto the streets in 2012 under the slogan #YoSoy132. The defense of Istanbul’s Gezi Park gave rise to a massive movement in June 2013, as did the Passe Livre for access to public transport in Brazil, or the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong 2014.

All these unique and contextualized mobilizations have something in common: they seem to be self-convened on the Internet based on spontaneous indignation that goes viral, and from there spills into the urban space. In addition, although their objectives are diverse and they do not have a common ideology, “In all cases, the central issue is democracy. They are movements for democracy” (Castells, 2013). But they are not fights for democracy circumscribed to the framework of national states, but rather in whose practices and discourses emerges a stronger idea of democracy that surpasses national identities and that aspires to a global scenario for a life in common.

They are insurgencies (Arditi, 2012) that challenge the state with very concrete demands, but at the same time have no programmatic platforms. Although the anti-globalization movement also took to the streets, it did so in accordance with its foes’ agenda: the world economic institutions, clearly the enemy to attack or block wherever they met. These new insurgencies emerge unexpectedly and their arrival on the scene reveals a will to be prefigurative, building spaces for common experimentation with much more individualized participation. While the global justice movement managed to bring together on the same stage many political families and activists from different groups, collectives, unions, and NGOs from different parts of the world, in the case of these insurgencies, the ones taking to the streets are not organized or previously politicized people.

Conclusions

Politics stops being a restricted sphere of the life of society, inhabited by political parties, institutions, and opinion leaders, or even a space run by the mass media, with its journalists as gatekeepers of what is said and what is not said. Politics also stops being a question of counterpublics (Fraser, 1997), or of organized groups of activists with elaborated ideas about emancipation. The demand for non-delegation, for speaking in the first person appears with unprecedented radicalism. For that reason, this kind of politics breaks with the logic of “friend and foe” that in his time Carl Schmitt (1996) defined, as shown by the fact that it does not take on board the distinction between left and right. The issue of identity loses importance and the capacity for inclusion is based more on dignity and the fact of sharing human life. As networks, those insurgencies can not be defined as a finite count of numerous parts, but multiplicities organized around the principle of perpetual inclusion. “While networks can be individuated and identified quite easily, networks are also more than one” (Galloway and Thacker, 2007:60). It is the unity and heterogeneity flow of a networked structure what allows individual participation in building the commons without mediation or representation.

The watcher is watched from the global street. Transparency and accessibility are the resource of every democratic revolution. In this last decades, corporations and business have taken by assault what should be the common space of communication. The powerful use technologies for secrets, espionage, and criminalization. But communication in the hands of the multitudes is the possibility of unmasking, exhibiting the authoritarianism of the 1%.

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Introduction

In the references concerning mathematical education one of the most important processes is the educational assessment. The process of mathematics assessment  is  usually in measured  with  knowledge and skills. But in the process of teaching and learning mathematics the attitudes and beliefs towards mathematics and corresponding teaching tools and teaching materials used by the teachers are also very important.

For the teachers working at the University the most important is the students assessment. The students' motivation, learning styles, learning outcomes, and satisfaction in achieving good results are all very welcome   during the learning process. In order to measure such attitudes and beliefs it is appropriate to use fuzzy set theory.

In this paper the Fuzzy theory is applied for the purpose of mathematics assessments. The students' data are gathered and analyzed.  First, the Fuzzy ToolBox of the software package MathLab is applied to build a fuzzy decision making system in order to obtain prescribed scores and to compare it with the real final scores. This results can be implemented in didactics research, because the input factors had different kind of numbers: exact numbers - representing results of pre-test and final scores, linguistic labels fuzzy numbers representing the attitude to mathematics and the use of teaching materials and tools books, computers, in particular software packages.

The obtained results of data represent contributions both to the application of fuzzy decision making system and to students' assessment. In the future the authors are supposed to apply obtained fuzzy decision making system to predict student scores at the beginning of the course in order to motivate students to work appropriate in their learning process.

Methods

We had started our research were done with  202 students, but we finished with 176  first year sciences students at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad. We lost 26 students, that be treated as a common number getting out their studies in different cases. Let us remark that all students were very motivated to take part in our research.

At the first lecture of our course the students got pre-test consisting of 10 mathematical tasks, and 6 points was maximum for each task.

Besides the usual measuring of students'  mathematical knowledge and skills (pre-test), the authors were interested in students' attitudes and beliefs of mathematics, in particular of using teaching materials, computers for learning. These input factors are consider, by authors, as relevant ones for assessment in the learning process of the compulsory mathematical contends in our course.

Results and Discussion

Let us denote the following parameters: the  results RP, the  results RFT, attitudes to mathematics by AM, attitudes to computers by AC, attitudes to  booksby AB, attitudes to t GeoGebra column by AG, the main results of predicted scores  PSCRS. Analyzing the differences between the predicted scores PSCRS and the  final scores RFT it is obvious that they are really very small, not bigger the 9 points (except in 7 in 44 cases).  It can be concluded that we are able to predict the students assessment in learning mathematics, expressed by  final marks, for almost all students. Students  who had more then 55 points passed the exam and the difference between the predicted and final score was less then 9, within one mark. Students who had less than 55 points, did not pass exams but the difference was less than 9.

Let us remark that mean value of difference is 5.47 and the median is 4.20.

Conclusions

The authors consider that the possibility of predicting the students marks at the beginning of our mathematical course can be useful for the students to get real picture of their possible mathematical assessment, and it can be an additional external factor of motivation for them to plan their learning of mathematics.

By the use of fuzzy set theory it can be concluded, in the didactic point of view that besides the knowledge expressed by the results pre-test, the mentioned attitudes and reliefs contributes to the students assessments.

Acknowledgments

Authors are thankful to the Ministry of Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia, project 174009.

Authors are thankful to the project "Mathematical models of intelligent systems and their applications" of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of  Vojvodina supported by Provincial Secretariat for Science and Technological Development of  Vojvodina.

References and Notes

1. Klement E., Mesiar R., Pap E., Triangular norms, Series: Trends in Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol.\ 8, Dordrecht, 2000.
2. Lee S., Harrison M., Godfrey Pell G., Robinson C., Predicting performance of first year engineering students and the importance of assessment tools therein, Engineering education 3(1) (2008) 44-51.
3. Stenmark, J. K., Ed. Mathematics Assessment: Myths, Models, Good Questions, and Practical Suggestions National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1906 Association Drive, Reston, VA 1991.
4. L. A. Zadeh, Fuzzy Sets, Information and Control 8  (1965)  338-353.

In this article, we analysis five typical city micro film samples of China and point that daily life narrative, which contains individual returning, daily scenes and emotional integration, is an obvious characteristic of city microfilm. We come to this conclusion by comparing with traditional city image propaganda film. The microfilm will promote our city by expressing city culture in the movie theme, by transforming the cultural landscape into a film background and by using some special audio elements with local characteristics. City microfilms, for all of their shortcomings, will have extensive application future.

In the traditional city promotional film in China, images often focus on the city's natural or human landscape.They attempt to include the most dazzling history and cultural elements of the city through montage and picture collage . The maximum impact they brought the audience comes mainly from the visual, formed a strong "spectacle" effect. Chinese traditional city promotional film likes to highlight the city individuality through a large number of city landscape, which eventually led to the result that the image of each city are similar.

City micro film, which appeared in the year of 2010. Obviously, the construction of city image is its fundamental purpose and exploring the theme culture of a city is its core goal. In recent years, the advantages of city micro film have become increasingly prominent. Its content and style are quite different from  the traditional propaganda film, which caused a lot of concern.In this study, we chose five typical city micro-film as a sample, which are IN Shenzhen (IN 深圳), Rooftops (天台), A Love Letter for Suzhou (苏州情书), Nanjing·201314 (南京·201314)and Next stop, Kunming (下一站，昆明).

City micro film mainly focuses on city daily life and pays attention to every person living in the city. Generally speaking, the city micro film has several obvious features. First of all, the general public, rather than the city landscape has become the main content of the video, which is totally different from Chinese traditional city promotional film. Secondly, city micro film always puts city landscape into a lot of stories about the city, which makes the city image more realistic than before. Furthermore, the emotional element is more prominent in city micro-film and it almost disappeared in traditional city propaganda films.

When it comes to the advantages of city micro film in the promotion of the city, there are four important aspects . Firstly, The theme of  the film is usually the theme of city culture, which helps people to remember the key words about the city culture when they watch the film. Secondly, the history and the landscape of the city will become the time and space backgrounds of the film and it will make the city culture more acceptable for the audience. Thirdly, dialogues and music  can become an important supplement to the spread of the city and this approach would be non-confrontational. Last but not least, the use of film creation technique offers room for imagination. In other words, it can affect people's understanding for the city.

Art is higher than life, but always comes from life. city micro film changes the way how a Chinese city sell itself. In the past, it pays  more attention to its external image. But now, it is more concerned about its spirit and culture. As far as I am concerned, this is not only the advantage brought by the progress of the information technology, but also brought by the transformation of the concept of propaganda in China.

At present more and more interactive multimedia technology is used in learning field and technology is getting mature. In addition to it’s easy to move, but is it really interested in visitors and really improved learning motivation. The traditional static exhibition is that really necessary to increase the interactive multimedia equipment. In this study, we use questionnaire and quantitative analysis. Understand the museum demonstration of visitors' motivation, satisfaction and analyze their learning performance. Order explore of Visitors' learning performance satisfaction difference between static and dynamic exhibition. The survey found that most people believe the museum use interactive multimedia demonstration, to create a positive learning museum demonstration field, to stimulate innovation and development, so that the museum industrial generate greater efficiency.

Introduction

One of the thinkers who influenced the studies on technology throughout the twentieth century was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His theory has even influenced many researchers who study the phenomenon of the internet, such as Paul Virilio, Arthur Kroker and Peter Sloterdijk, to name a few. The reception of his work, however, has been marked by controversy, especially because of his explicit support to National Socialism for a period of his life.

For many authors, the concepts formulated by Heidegger are essentially marked by the same convictions that led him to National Socialism. However, until a little over a year ago, despite the stain of his adherence to National Socialism, there was no concrete evidence of anti-Semitism in his work. This changed with the publication of the first part of the “Black Notebooks” at the beginning of 2014, in which there are passages that express a certain resentment toward the Jews.

According to the editor of the “Black Notebooks,” Peter Trawny [1], it is quite clear that there are anti-Semitic passages. What is not clear yet is to what extent his work as a whole is affected by them. For the area of philosophy of technology, the question is more specific: How is his newly confirmed anti-Semitism related to his concept of technology? What implications do the anti-Semitic passages from “Black Notebooks” have for the reflection on contemporary technologies and especially on the internet?

In order to contribute to this debate, this paper intends to present the first results of a research that is still in its early stages, namely reflections drawn from an analysis of the main passages of the “Black Notebooks” which refer to the Jews, of the book “Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung” by Trawny and of some other materials that already dealt with Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism.

The discussion is divided into four parts. Firstly I present Heidegger’s definition of technology. This will be done by a revision of the main ideas of the philosopher on the subject, based specially on his text “Die Frage nach der Technik.” The second part aims to present the relations between his thought and the ideas of the National Socialism, based on some critics and on Trawny’s explanation about the role of the Jewry in his thought. In the third part, I intend to discuss the connections between the Jewry and technology in those passages. The anti-Semitic excerpts contain clear ties to the concept of technology. The argumentation intends to explore these links in order to understand to what extent the concept of technology is tainted by his anti-Semitism. In the fourth and last part I deal with the question whether the conclusions of his concept of technology depend on such anti-Semitic background.

Heidegger’s technology

For Heidegger, the decisive question in technology is beyond the technological object. Heidegger believed that the object is only the manifestation of something, not what is decisive in itself. Technology is a mode of thinking, which he calls calculative thinking. This thinking seeks to control the development of all processes in order to obtain at the end an optimized product.

In its current phase, when it has become a planetary phenomenon, trying to cover everything and everyone, it turned into enframing (Gestell, in the original German), a whole way of framing reality [2]. It represents the hegemony of the calculative thinking. It is an attempt to measure and represent the “real” that culminates in the transformation of everything into raw material (Bestand) for the operation of the very economic, political and technological system. In the age of technology, every aspect of the real (nature, objects and human beliefs and practices) only makes sense if it contributes to the permanent reproduction of this framework and, finally, of technology itself as the only valid mode of thinking.

It is important to remember that the mode of self-presentation of the real for Dasein is exactly what Heidegger had in mind with his concept of “Sein” (to be). In his history of being, things appear to humans from different perspectives, and this is directly related to the beliefs of each era. Depending on what the human beings believe the real to be, they will see it under certain aspects and deal with it in a certain way. In the age of technology, according to Heidegger, the real presents itself for humans as raw material. This moment when everything would be seen as raw material is, for him, the completion of metaphysics, the maximal point of the long history of Western thought since Plato.

Nazism and anti-Semitism in his work

Michael Zimmerman considers this a very interesting interpretation. The history of the West would be a long decline in successive stages of what it means “to be,” culminating in the simplistic way of the age of technology in which “to be” would mean “to be raw material for the self-enhancing technological system” [3]. However, Zimmerman suggests that this is exactly the kind of interpretation that the Nazi political right had adopted in Heidegger’s period. Then, it would not be original and, even worse, would contribute to a conservative view of society, because it tends to a return to the past and to an escape from the challenges of modernity.

Moreover, far from representing a great novelty, his thought would have been just limited by this political alignment. Johannes Fritsche is even more emphatic. For him, the work of Heidegger “belongs unequivocally to the political right, and Heidegger opted also for its extreme, the National Socialism” [4]. As such, there would be no room for his work on the list of politically progressive perspectives. Victor Farías reached the same conclusions [5].

The picture becomes even more complicated with the emergence of anti-Semitic passages in the “Black Notebooks.” According to Trawny, these are passages that clearly point to a “seinsgeschichtlichen Antisemitismus,” an anti-Semitism that is connected with the “history of being.” Heidegger would have seen in the historical moment of the early twentieth century the last stage of the Greek proposal of understanding of being, when humanity would be living an uprooting phase (Entwurzelung), lack of perspective, nihilism. It would be the opportunity for a new beginning in the history of being, and, according to Heidegger, the Germans were called to propose this new beginning, by bringing back and strengthening the notion of the necessary relation of a people (Volk) with its home (Heimat). Who was imposed as enemy? Precisely those who would be “worldless” (weltlos) and “homeless” (heimatlos), which would adopt a cosmopolitan lifestyle and that would threaten the achievement of the German people’s destination. What is clear in the “Black Notebooks” is that Heidegger saw the Jewish people as fulfilling this gap.

Technology in the anti-Semitic passages

In this context, technology seems to play a crucial role. Firstly, Heidegger associates the increase of power of the Jewry with the Western metaphysics, which “offered the attachment point for the expansion (Sichbreitmachen) of an empty rationality and ability of calculating” [6]. Heidegger speaks further of the Jews as having the “ability of calculating” (Rechenfähigkeit). They “live with their stressed calculated talent” [7].

As previously mentioned, one of the Heideggerian definitions of technology is that it represents the completion of metaphysics and that it is the calculative thinking itself. By associating calculative thinking as a Jewish capacity, Heidegger suggests somehow that technology is at least a significant embodiment of the Jewry. Trawny points out that Heidegger does not want to suggest any kind of biological association. Bernhard Radhoff had already made clear that Heidegger’s concept of people was radically different from the one of National Socialism, and–instead of collective subject–meant the horizon from which the being differentiates itself from other beings [8]. Anyway, the Jewish people would be provided with this technological calculative thinking.

Moreover, Heidegger clearly relates the global Jewry with “machination” (Machenschaft). Machination was the first concept coined by the philosopher to define the essence of technology, later replaced by Gestell. Machination highlights how the human being in the technological stage of history understands the real as “makable” (“machen”, in the original language, means “to make”), available to the human experiences. In the “Black Notebooks,” Heidegger affirms that machination established race as a principle of the history, by which human life can be better measured, controlled and cultivated, typical processes of technology. “The establishment of racial breeding does not come from ‘life’ itself, but from the overpowering of life through the machination,” adds Heidegger [7]. It is a “consequence” of the power of machination.

This passage is preceded by a sentence partially mentioned above, in which it is said that the Jewry has already lived for a long period according to the principle of race. That means that their way of living is the one that is set in motion by the machination, an explicit relation between global Jewry and technology. To live “worldless” would be just a consequence of machination, and as Trawny places, Jews were characterized by Heidegger as worldless. They would, according to Heidegger, be dominated by machination. “The Jew appears as the worldless calculative subject, dominated by ‘machination’” [9]. The global Jewish, thus, would be the first people dominated by technology. With this, the Jews would have become a vehicle of the technological uprooting, to transmit to the world a worldless lifestyle.

Alternatives

There seems to be no doubt that Heidegger’s concept of technology was born embedded in his resentment against the Jewry, seen as the enemy of Germany in the fulfillment of its destiny. The question now is whether his conclusions on the matter depend on this anti-Semitic background. To approach this question, it is interesting to evoke some critical theses about the contemporary technological world derived from Heidegger’s ideas. Many of the most provocative ideas about technology are based on his concepts without containing any anti-Semitism.

By itself, stating that technology causes uprooting cannot be discarded immediately, although in the context of the philosopher that is related to the Jews. Arguably, along with Paul Virilio [10], for example, the contemporary technological thinking is causing an uprooting process while it removes its reference to time-space and accelerates human life. This is not in itself an anti-Semitic thesis.

Specifically regarding the internet, at least part of its success seems to lie precisely in its amazing ability of representation, measurement and control (contacts on social networks, visits to pages, file downloads, profiles, surveillance etc.), as Baudrillard noticed [11]. While this interpretation corresponds to Heidegger’s thesis that in the age of technology the human being is eager to represent, measure and calculate everything, it does not seem to depend on a political position that identifies a people or specific ethnic group as its vehicle, even less as an enemy to be overcome.

No doubt Heidegger was a conservative, but the very thesis from Fritsche, that the only thing Heidegger craved was to repeat the past, needs to be reassessed, for instance, when taking into account the text “Gelassenheit” [12]. Heidegger says that it is not the case of exterminating technology–back to a past that no longer exists–but of developing a peaceful, serene relationship with it, not the mere refusal but at the same time without the illusion that, by adhering to it, we are taking significant steps toward progress.

Fierce critics like Zimmerman acknowledge that Heidegger’s work is ambiguous. “The fact that he chose to interpret his own texts as consistent with National Socialism does not mean that others must interpret them in the same way” [13]. It can be read without the political background that Heidegger chose to it. The internet can be understood as a phenomenon that expresses human drive to control the real and as a symptom of enframing and uprooting, without incurring a reactionary thought and even less anti-Semitism. But the imminent risk of a conservative interpretation of the internet must always be kept in mind when using Heidegger. The internet as an uprooting phenomenon, for example, can only be understood without a nostalgic trace when one reads it consciously, that is, if one realizes how easily this kind of interpretation leads to a yearning for forms of pre-industrial life.

Conclusions

Although this research is still in its initial phase, the results above strengthen the thesis that the anti-Semitic passages in the “Black Notebooks” present problems for Heidegger’s idea of modern technology. There is no doubt that Heidegger saw technology in the light of his anti-Semitism. Whether this means that all Heidegger’s interpretation of technology needs to be discarded is another point. Some of the most fruitful critics of the technological world, such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Arthur Kroker, developed provocative theses based on Heidegger’s insights, without there being any trace of anti-Semitism in their works.

To summarize, his concept of technique was coined in the context of his anti-Semitism. To some extent, one can even admit, updating Zimmerman’s thesis, that his anti-Semitism has restricted his understanding of technology. But at least important parts of his concept do not depend on anti-Semitism. However, even if one can enjoy aspects of Heidegger’s conception of technology as a critical reflection on the contemporary context, especially in relation to internet, it is clear the need to build a new narrative to such criticism, rescuing it from the hornet’s nest in which Heidegger himself put it.

References and Notes

1. Trawny, Peter. Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung; Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt, Germany, 2014.
2. Heidegger, Martin. Vorträge und Aufsätze; Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt, Germany, 2000, pp. 5-36.
3. Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger‘s confrontation with modernity; Indiana University Press: Indianapolis, USA, 1990, p. xiv.
4. Fritsche, Johannes. Geschichtlichkeit und National-Sozialismus in Heideggers Sein und Zeit; Nomos: Baden-Baden, Germany, 2014, p. 8.
5. Farías, Victor. Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus; Fischer: Frankfurt, Germany, 1989.
6. Heidegger, Martin. Überlegungen XII-XV: Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941; Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt, Germany, 2014, p. 46.
7. Heidegger, Martin. Überlegungen XII-XV: Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941; Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt, Germany, 2014, p. 56.
8. Radhoff, Bernhard. Heidegger and the question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt; University of Toronto Press: Toronto, USA, 2007.
9. Trawny, Peter. Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung; Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt, Germany, 2014, p. 38.
10. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb; Verso, London, UK, and New York, USA, 2000.
11. Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Ilusion; Columbia University Press: New York, USA, 2000.
12. Heidegger, Martin. Gelassenheit; Klett-Cota, Stuttgart, Germany, 2008.
13. Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger‘s confrontation with modernity; Indiana University Press: Indianapolis, USA, 1990, p. 38.

Converging media technologies, such as smartphones, are now used around the world to micro-coordinate interactions and to manage knowledge and relationships. In particular the everyday lives of young people worldwide are increasingly “mediatized” (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield 2008). Particularly since the proliferation of 3G mobile standards new modes of digital self-expression, practices of life-streaming as well as new emotional modes of communication have evolved.

The increasing permeation of the digital and the physical realm by means of these mobile converging media technologies cannot be regarded as a neutral process, but changes the way in which we relate to others and ourselves, thereby impacting the basic mechanisms of sociality. Users in Europe and Asia not only take advantage of the potential of widening cultural horizons beyond the barriers of locality, but also more importantly seem to adopt media technologies in order to foster social embeddedness in a culture of constant flux, as exemplified by studies studies on Taiwanese (Wei & Lo 2006) and European (Livingstone & Haddon 2009) online and gadget cultures.

Referring to an on-going transcultural study this paper analyses the practices and meanings of lifelogging and lifestreaming among young people in Taiwan and Austria by examining communicative modes and figurations (Hasebrink 2004) instead of focusing on distinct devices and services. Focussing on the question if culture – viewed as a repertoire of symbols and practices – impacts on the one hand the ways of adopting and using converging media technologies we examine how new communicative practices interact with existing textures of sociality.

Within the frame of this study firstly, a total of 50 qualitative episodic interviews (Flick 1996) (30 in Vienna, Austria; 20 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan) and 4 focus groups among students between 18 and 25 were conducted to uncover globalized practices as well as cultural differences with regards to the use of converging media technologies as lifelogging and lifestreaming tools. Secondly, a standardized online questionnaire (n= 500 Taiwan and Austria) was applied to complement the results of the qualitative study, analysing the interrelationship of types of relationships, stages of intimacy and communicative practices.

The results show, that converging media technologies foster a more differentiated management of relationships (“easy use and arrangement of contacts”) and that socially homophile practices (contacts based on “same interests” or “same school”) ease the initiation of contacts, which is highly appreciated by all interviewees. However, “cultural models” (D’Andrade 1985) frame the ways that these technologies are adopted to manage relationships, as well as which media channel is chosen for managing which type of relationship. Due to the fact that converging media technologies are ubiquitous and freely accessible, a new type of connectivity has emerged, arising from the shift of being logged on to being “always on”. The results indicate that lifelogging and lifestreaming practices on the one hand create a new type of reminiscence, which supports new modes of emotional expression and intimacy. In the other hand the young users experience a loss of privacy (“I am never alone”), peer pressure (“fear of missing out”), growing impatience, and new routines (“checking behaviour” or “fluid dating practices”), social comparison (“like what my friends like”), and moreover body-expression/posture (“head down culture” and “wiping”) and embodiment (“phantom-pain if my smartphone is not here”) evolve.

Culturally based differences could be identified with regards to the meanings of family and friendships as well as the related communicative practices and channels. Moreover, users from Taiwan attach more importance the speed of reciprocity and are less critical about the ‘loss of privacy’.

Global society is a complex system consisting of interacting subsystems at multiple scales. Nations, states, religions, languages, local, international institutions and governments, enterprises, fishing clubs, families, persons and pets are only a few examples. Clearly, social subsystems and units are fuzzy, overlapping and interacting in a largely non-hierarchical manner. While many of the social subsystems such as companies, armies and factories are highly organized, others, such as linguistic dialects or religious beliefs are much more fuzzy. Almost without exception however, contemporary governance structures are organized hierarchically which leads to the false impression that society can be described and, moreover, governed, based solely on a hierarchical model.

We propound to view a social system as a living cognitive system [3-5]. The paper proposes a model of a scalable cognitive system [7,8] and a derived vision of distributed governance – A World of Views [6] as a framework for a futuristic global society also known as A Global Brain [1,2]. At each scale, the model describes a population of interacting elements which are themselves compound systems at a lower scale thus representing a nested structure of recursively defined interacting sub-systems. Remarkably, the model facilitates the representation of fuzzy-bounded and overlapping sub-systems as well as their interactions both within and across the scales. Such a system cannot be designed or controlled hierarchically, but rather evolves while interacting in its environment. Central to our approach therefore is the concept of synthetic cognitive development - a general process for modeling the dynamics of the global society [8].

Society as a cognitive system operates by making sense of its environment and of itself. Sense-making is a continuous effort of grasping elements of the social realm and self and their ongoing relations in order to anticipate their trajectories and effectively introspect and interact. By engaging in interactive sense-making, a cognitive system is constructively guiding the emergence of new structures and relations as well as facilitating the disintegration of the old ones. Synthetic cognitive development is defined as a progressive process of increasing the sense-making capability of the system. We argue that cycles of integration and disintegration guide the ongoing individuation of a system towards higher levels of sense-making and coordination.

The concept of information society highlights the significance of information technology for the cognitive development and structure of the whole sociotechnological system. We discuss how the emerging information technologies are disrupting the cognitive development of society via three mechanisms: (1) the conversion of existing sub-systems of the global society into a digital form; (2) the multiplication and diversification of the digitized sub-systems at all scales; (3) the accelerating hyper-connectivity and speed of information exchange, affecting integration and coordination within the global system.

We want to guide our social organizations to become more intelligent and serve us better, in other words - to make better sense of their environment and sub-systems. We apply our model for describing the dynamics and evolution of the information society. In our conception, the Global Brain is a “world of views” – an ecology for interaction of competing and cooperating multiple cognitive agencies of different scales rather than a singular unified entity. This ecology allows for the emergence of temporarily integrated cognitive organizations at any scale and ensures that obsolete hierarchies get eventually disintegrated, thus effectively substantiating a living cognitive society.

References and Notes

1. Heylighen, Francis. 2002. “The Global Brain as a New Utopia.” Zukunftsfiguren, Suhrkamp, Frankurt.
2. Heylighen, Francis, Margeret Heath, and Frank Van Overwalle. 2004. “The Emergence of Distributed Cognition: A Conceptual Framework.” In Proceedings of Collective Intentionality IV.
3. Luhmann, Niklas. 1986. “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems.” Sociocybernetic Paradoxes, 172–92.
4. Maturana, H. R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Springer Science & Business Media.
5. Miller, James G. 1975. “Living Systems: The Society.” Behavioral Science 20 (6): 366–535. doi:10.1002/bs.3830200603.
6. Veitas, Viktoras, and David R. Weinbaum. 2013. “A World of Views.” In The End of the Beginning: Life, Society and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity, edited by Ben Goertzel and Ted Goertzel.
7. Weinbaum, D. R. 2012. A Framework for Scalable Cognition: Propagation of Challenges, Towards the Implementation of Global Brain Models. GBI Working paper 2012-12. Global Brain Institute.
8. Weinbaum, David, and Viktoras Veitas. 2014. “Synthetic Cognitive Development: Where Intelligence Comes from.” ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:1411.0159. http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.0159.