Tag: society

Technological Humanism

Artificial Intelligence, Complex Systems, Philosophy of Mind, SoftwareNo Comments

We are assisting to a brand new kind of humanism: in a period characterized by a continuous “wave” of technological improvements, the oldest idea of a person is again ready to be considered as a concrete focal point. Even the most orthodox “tech-fun” can easily understand the importance of putting each natural, direct relation inside a world often made up only of silicon and intangible atoms of information; I’m an engineer and certainly won’t try to hide my “love” for any kind of technology, however, I’m also looking at the impressive growth of social networks and the only plausible reason which comes to my mind is that of a different approach to technology widespread. Not a product to study, customize and eventually use, but rather a simple service “forged” on real needs and, above all, completely human-oriented. Several authors (like J. Rifkin) wrote books and papers about this phenomenon, but […]

Web 2.0: A “Sociological” Point of View

Complex SystemsNo Comments

A Web 2.0 “Sociological” point of view is probably the most interesting analysis, mainly because it can be really considered as the very network revolution. Web 1.0 could rely only on a kind of link: the one obtained from <a …> tags; its purpose was (and still it is) to allow the connection between two different documents according to their content or other criteria (they’re often marketing-oriented). Thus the resultant network was made up of several (pseudo-)static or slowly changing nodes which connectivity was always bound by lots of limitations (first of all a spare knowledge about similar resources). The pure hypertextual technology was certainly great, but its weaker point was that of hiding the human beings, with their mutable nature, who were always behind the origin and development of each document (or web page). Web 1.0 was just like a geographical network (like a city map, for example) where human action […]