Context Versus Context-Less and the Mechanism of Relations. Experimental Research in Progress

Abstract

A different shape of order in the terrains of information and communication technologies arose From Ford’s ‘in-line production’, Le Corbusier’s geometrical utopia and Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society’ to the ‘online production’ of information, Gehry’s Bilbao Museum and Burroughs’s information-based ‘control society’. In the disciplinary society [6], the order was structured by functional and organizational divisions, each including their own rules and borders and the hierarchical system was the main component of organization and management; separated micro-societies within one, starting from families, then schools, barracks, hospitals and so on [4]. These rational divisions in the industrial capitalism of 18th and early 19th century, powered by the cold war ideology, were keeping the society in order towards the proliferation of goods’ production, while in the information society, the production of material goods does not have central dominance: what controls the new market is the ‘information’, as the new ‘meta- product’ [4]. The transition from mono-directional ‘in line’ mass production to the multi-directional ‘on line meta-product’, taking the geometrical order of the classic industrial era to the ‘edge of the chaos’ [9], led to the contemporary network era. Such multi-directionality, beside its economic and political causes and effects, can be important for urban designers regarding the changing dimensions in human’s mental and physical interaction with urban space and context, when time is involved with ‘data throughput’ and geographical barriers are traversed wirelessly.