Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live

Book

Author(s):
Eric Chown Fernando Nascimento

Year: 2023

Lever Press 2023

Keywords: Digital Metaphors Semantic Layers
Language(s): English

Abstract:
As smartphones mediate more of our activities, they are changing our relationship with meaning. To a teenager, for example a “conversation” is just as likely to refer to an exchange of text messages as it is a face-to-face discussion. Meanwhile, Facebook has redefined what friendship means, Snapchat what a memory means, etc. The kinds of changes smartphones bring are happening at rapid pace: TikTok reached a billion users in just over three years, whereas it took the telephone 75 years to reach a tenth of that number of people. Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live by Eric Chown and Fernando Nascimento offers systematic reconsideration of the ways in which digital technologies impact our lives both individually and collectively. Metaphors aren’t just a clever way to describe technology, they are also changing the way we think. When we click on a picture of a shopping cart it connects a complex set of technologies to represent a simple idea that we’re all familiar with. A heart icon under a photo is understood as an easy way to express appreciation. We aren’t required to understand how technology works, just how we interact with it. The ambiguity of metaphors, and the complexity of technology can also hide important realities about what is being described. “The cloud,” for example, actually consists of very real data centers, which consume huge amounts of natural resources to keep running. Meanwhile, pressing that heart icon on a photo is a signal to the artificial intelligences running in your app that you want to see more things like that photo and that it should adjust what it knows about you accordingly.

https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12668201

Post created by: Fergal Lenehan