1. 1 Med 7 - Fall 2005 Digital Culture Globalization and Complexity Luis E. Bruni

2. 2 Ideological Globalization vs. Global Complexity  Technological evolution has produced an increasing perception of multiple synergetic pathways of interaction.  Changes due to “globalisation”  are leading to changes in paradigms which tend to reintegrate the reductionist or fragmented disciplines and views that cannot grasp the increasing complexity of such synergetic pathways.

3. 3 Ideological Globalization  Economic determinism.  Globalization as economical interdependence.  Globalization of production and finances  Western liberal democracies and market economies

4. 4 Global production  The global economy has the capacity for utilizing the territorial divisions of the international economy.  It plays in the different territorial jurisdictions in order to maximize:  cost reductions  tax cuts  evasion of environmental regulations  control over the workforce  guarantees for stability and political favouritism.

5. 5 Global complexity  The evolution of many kind of interdependent processes.  Global issues.  Globalization  our perception of the evolution of human communication.  Interdependent cultural and institutional web  through which the interdependence of human behaviours are canalized.

6. 6 Increasing complexity  Events and the relations between them have always been complex and intercommunicated throughout evolution.  However  today a series of factors  global issues  which determine our perception of events as in an increasing complexity.  The incidence of the exponential industrial and technological development  the central column of this new perception of the interrelation of events  what we call “globalisation”.

7. 7 Units of analysis  Not easy to delimit discrete units of analysis  such as “units”, “subsystems”, “system”  as e.g.: citizens, leader, government, State, international system.  The semiosphere  a continuum in which the frontiers between the different units and levels of analysis are not discretely separate  a continuous and complex process of communication  cultural contexts and processes not easily hierarchisizable.  Umwelt  semiotic niche  an aggregate of semiotic niches  space- time-mental units delimited by zones of interface which relate such niches with concentric processes  larger or smaller  which contain the unit or are contained by it  or which are contiguous and overshadowing  part of the same process  diachronic and/or synchronic  in which we can be interested at a particular moment.

8. 8 Space-time-mental units  The spatial scale  The temporal scale  The semiotic scale

9. 9 The spatial scale  The extension of the physical domain of a given phenomenon.  The environment in which a particular semiotic process unfolds trough out time.  e.g.: a household, a production line, a fabric, and industrial zone, a city, a country, a habitat, an ecosystem, a continent, the biosphere …  Digital culture  a pc-workstation, an intranet, a network of satellite stations …

10. 10 The temporal scale  The definition of the temporal dimension.  A day, a year, life cycle of a product, a human life, different generations, centuries, a historical perspective, future generations, from the beginning of the beginnings, for ever and always …  Digital culture  the diachronic-synchronic dimension of the particular semiotic event.

11. 11 The semiotic scale  The mental and cognitive dimension and the context that characterizes a given semiotic process on which we may be interested in a given space-time  It considers the hierarchies and the logical types of the communicational contexts that are unfolded in a given space-time  E.g.: a negotiation, a social pathology, an ecosystem breakdown, symbiosis between different organisms, an act of war, a theater play …  Digital culture  a chat session, a web-conference, a videogame session, the monitoring of a hurricane, an speculative bubble, electronic war …

12. 12 Global Cultural-Institutional Technoweb  Through recent decades  a global cultural-institutional network has gradually grown up to project, implement and use an enormous technological web that is supposed to observe, monitor, communicate, inventory and asses a variety of natural and social processes.  This web has been growing through the proliferation of structures that include a great variety of artifacts, hardware, software and implementable conceptual tools of diverse typologies and degrees of sophistication.

13. 13 Information and monitoring systems This “structure” includes:  Networks of monitoring and communication satellites.  Information-sharing technology.  Cable and wireless telecommunication technology.  Data acquisition, manipulation and display through large-scale computing and modeling (e.g.: multilayer Geographical Information Systems).  Remote-sensing techniques.  In situ robots and sensors for advanced site characterization and monitoring.  Complex systems dynamics modeling; experts systems and artificial intelligence decision making technology; etc., etc…

14. 14 Integration of technologies The technological mutation implicit in these global communication and monitoring systems is the consequence of the development and integration of various technologies such as:  Data telecommunication  wireless  global;  Technology for the manipulation and “intelligent” management of data;  Aerospace and military technology  Remote sensing, among others.

15. 15 Ecological and socio-cultural processes This technological integration is being used as a source of information and automated interpretation of local/global processes to conform comprenhensive and dynamic databases:  natural  military  economic  social  agricultural  infrastructure

16. 16 Sustainability  It is important to understand how this grand technological web is itself generated by, and in the same time lodges, a mental process inherent to the logic of the developments.  What cultural premises ”flow” within this web?  What sort of old an new, bad and good, epistemological habits are being shape and re- shape in such a semiosphere?

17. 17 Content Digital Culture Interfaces Semiosphere Cultural Products Hybrid Ad-hoc UtilityConcept Applied Basic Science Art Technology Medialogy

18. Technical problem Past Experiences (evolution) Future Perspectives State of the art Socio-cultural implications Applications Digital Culture