[TISEA] Panel Paper: Peter d’Agostino & David Tafler – The Techno/Cultural Interface: String Cycles and Watch the Skies

ABSTRACT

In a contracting world, real-time visual telecommunication may become a ‘hologrammatic’ nightmare. As high-tech applications proliferate, they threaten to accelerate the eradication of cultural difference. Each new system’s material reality makes claims on its users; each new wave impacts proportionately on the language, ritual,  influence and power among communities. Borders change, territories diminish. As distances diminish, the collision of social forces disrupts, fragments, and eventually destroys contingent customs and practices, particularly those predicated on earlier, now outmoded, networks of time and space. While technology may destabilise frontiers, does high technology inevitably destroy tradition?

  • Peter d’Agostino (USA) has been working in video since I971 and in interactive media over the last decade. He is co-director of the Hypermedia Lab and Professor of Communications at Temple University.
  • David Tafler (USA) is a member of the Media Studies faculty of Widener University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on interactive media and new technologies.

Full text p 47-54