How Technology Changes Culture

A group of Spanish investigators is investigating the effects that newly-adopted technologies are having on our culture, especially in its narrative and writing forms. Thus far, the results are very interesting.

The research team is headed by professor Antonio Rodriguez de las Heras, who is based at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) Institute of Culture and Technology.

Thus far, the scientists have focused their efforts on understanding the effects that new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are having on the consumption of culture products.

One of the primary conclusions in the new investigation is that ICT are drastically changing the way in which cultural content is being produced at this point, AlphaGalileo reports.

“We are at the beginning but we can indeed affirm that the changes will be quite profound because we are abandoning the space of the page, the paper support, and are introducing multimedia writing,” the team leader points out.

“All of this will take us to a concept of transmission of the written word which is completely different than that which we have had for centuries,” Rodriguez de las Heras adds.

Over the millenia, the main support for writing has changed from clay tablets to papyrus, and then from scrolls to paper. At this point, digital media represents the main support for writing, the experts say.

“This new support offers writing some very thought-provoking possibilities, which are very difficult to resist,” the professor adds, saying that modern digital writing has other types of space in addition to the traditional page.

“This new way of reaching the eyes of the reader today is one of the challenges of the ergonomics of reading in the new artifacts,” the expert adds, saying that this state of affairs is changing the reader too.

According to the UC3M team, the new reader is an individual that has different expectations from the writing and reading support they uses from their predecessors did just decades ago.

One interesting thing to note is that the new reader also wants to have access to new ways of moving in this transmission of content. These demands are completely different those that existed in the past.

Related to this, the way in which content creators report themselves to culture consumers also changes. Artists now have new means of expressing themselves, and have a wider array of media available to do so.

“The most striking of these new creative changes is that the transmission of the information of the messages in these means involves work similar to the Japanese art of folding paper, Origami,” the expert adds.

“Folded messages have to be sent, that is, ones which are hyper-textual and three-dimensional, which are opened up, constituting an extraordinary area of creativity and communication,” he concludes.