Technology And Culture - E-book - ePub

This book is intended as a very personal essay and has that focus and structure. Based on the conviction of its author, expressed through data on human evolution, reasoning, references from different authors, examples and experiences of his own and others, he argues that science, technique and technology should be recognized as a social component of the area of ??culture, something that practically does not happen now and that does not seem to be part of the wishes of the vast majority of scientists, technicians and technologists.
In addition, its objective is to establish a set of conceptual principles on socio-infotechnoculture, hypothetically applicable, with different levels and approaches, both to the training and activities of technicians in infotechnology (ICT, In usual practice, it is easy to verify that what we read or hear about culture and the cultural events convened refer to literature, painting and sculpture, theater and other performing arts, cinema, music, artistic heritage in general, that is, to a part of the extensive territory known to Humanities, including the historical processes of the aforementioned areas.
Some time ago, in 1959, Snow publicly exposed his theory of the Two Cultures, to highlight the gap between humanists and scientists, a concept that is still being mentioned, although, for the author of this essay, speaking today of two cultures, unless If it is done with the conviction that we are talking about two immense continents, each one made up of a mosaic of multiple and fragmentary knowledge, Among other issues, in the first chapter we analyze through some academic approach the meaning of ´culture´, with initial reference to its three meanings in the 22nd edition of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (DRAE), to see if it is necessary to consider the culture with or without surnames, how many types of culture are there, what is meant by a "cultured person", does it currently make sense to speak of general culture, and so on.
We dedicate more text to the second lexical meaning of the term 'culture', which has become synonymous with specialized knowledge, which fuels the need to complement the word 'culture' with prefixes (eg neuroculture, neuroeconomics, socioinfotechnoculture ...) or with one or more surnames (eg, digital culture, music culture, Italian opera culture ...). In general, the use of surnames or prefixes is not only necessary to locate the term in the designated area within the immense spectrum of a specialization, but also within the countless variety of human customs or hobbies (3rd meaning of ´culture´ in the DRAE).
Practically, the word 'culture' has become something polysemic, a verbal wild card.