Digital intimacy

Abstract

Our gaze on technology is often short-sighted, even cross-eyed. It focuses only on technological novelty and forgets the other half of the issue: human beings and their ways of using technology.

My new book Confidenze Digitali: Vizi e virtù dell’innovazione (‘Digital intimacy: Vices and virtues of innovation’) starts from everyday life situations that we all know well and from habits that are as widespread as they are unconscious, analyzing key features that characterize our relationship with technology and more in general contemporary society.

For example, why do big tech companies, chatbot and virtual assistants address us confidentially as friends, rather than customers? Why do we often receive kisses and hugs in messages, even from people we do not really know that well? If the person sitting next to us looks at their telephone, why are we likely to do the same within thirty seconds? Why do we not want to pay to read daily news anymore, but we are ready to donate money to Wikipedia? Where does the extraordinary spread of video tutorials on «how to do…» anything – from fresh bread to barbecues, from dying hair to repairing a roller shutter – come from? And what does it say about us?