High-tech Culture Research Articles

Kako digitalno doba oblikuje um mladih

The paper explores changes that occur in the human mind as a consequence of life in digital age. The specific subject of the analysis is the impact on the human mind and overall human activity of human existence dominated by screen culture, where mobile phones, tablets, iPods, computers have become inevitable parts of everyday life. Through the analysis of the thought process of teenagers, who are now refered to in literature as "screenagers" and whose life is characterised by copy-paste education, decline of reading culture and new forms of addiction to technology and its impact on their behaviour, this paper will show that this new high-tech culture has led to emergence of increasingly difficult direct, offline interpersonal communication and to a decline of social skills. The main goal of the research is to determine how the mind of a modern man works today in the age of electronic markets, web-economy, social networking, cybercrime, love at first "site" and how the human mind reacts to the effect of technology on our privacy.

FACTURE, TEXTURE AND TEHNO-ORNAMENT IN MODERN DESIGN: FUNCTION AND ARTISTIC MEANING

The article is devoted to defining the place and role of textured formations and techno-ornament in modern design, setting out the features of their use and methods of obtaining. The sources of the artistic attitude to the texture and texture of the material in the creation of works of decorative and applied art, interiors are briefly outlined, the importance of increased attention to them in the modern period is revealed. A special role is assigned to techno-ornamentation, which has arisen in high-tech culture and has become an exponent of new rhythmic-plastic images that are in tune with modernity. Images with machine aesthetics with alternating elements that do not have open semantic content. The authors came to the conclusion that in the late 20 th to the early 21 st centuries there was an unprecedented increase in interest in textured and textural ornamental formations. Their images are very vague and associated with an environment largely distanced from humans. Ornament in such an environment is extremely contextual.

The Dynamics of the Largest Cybersecurity Industrial Clusters: San Francisco Bay Area, Washington D.C. And Israel

This report offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on the cybersecurity industry. Conceptualizing cybersecurity industry clusters as ecosystems, we focus on three distinct mega-clusters: the San Francisco Bay Area, metropolitan Washington, D.C., and Israel. Benefits of clustering include: access to a pool of specialized labor, knowledge spillover, access to capital, and inter-organizational linkages. Research suggests that clusters’ economics should be linked to their social dimensions and the configuration of the built environment. In addition, based on the empirical analysis, we suggest using a nuanced taxonomy of cybersecurity clusters using a spectrum of intensities: mega-, mesa- and micro-clusters, sub-clusters, and hot zones. The Big3 clusters were catalyzed during the 1990s cybersecurity genesis – even before cybersecurity was recognizable as a distinct sub-industry within high-tech – and certainly well before the term “cybersecurity” was coined. All three cybersecurity clusters emerged as specialized clusters embedded within a larger high-tech ecosystem. At the same time, government was a key actor in facilitating the high-tech and defense ecosystems in each of these three regions. Cluster concentration remains high: the Big3 mega-clusters, hegemonic since their founding, together serve as headquarters for 53% of the largest and most influential global cybersecurity firms. Cybersecurity industry dynamics. The industry can be viewed as a manifestation of two far-reaching relationship interplays: industry clustering processes and place (meaning, the industry’s socio-spatial context). Regarding the first: there is some evidence of rapid industry consolidation — especially within the Big3 clusters (393 firms merged or acquired through 2018). However, the industry still remains quite fragmented because of the continued entry of new players and the breakup of some giant firms (e.g., Symantec). The second interplay is between place and social context, human capital, and institutions. Via comprehensive mapping, we show that cybersecurity clusters are situated in large, diverse urban regions, within complex, multi-modal transportation networks, with proximate universities, and layered on household income sectors.Lessons for smaller clusters globally. Cybersecurity clusters (and sub-clusters) grow where one of two conditions exists: an anchor organization (such as the National Security Agency outside Washington) and/or where there is already a strong high-tech culture (as in Silicon Valley). Nurturing a new cybersecurity cluster is a long-term strategy, one that requires many years of patience (as in the Be’er Sheva sub-cluster in Israel). Local governments have been nurturing cybersecurity clusters specifically for about a decade with tax benefits, partnerships, and advocacy programs. However, these policies do not take place in a vacuum; rather, they are part of the ongoing competition between regions and cities. Thus, purposeful cluster growth requires more than a bundle of policies; it needs a cohesive strategic plan that structures a set of policies for nurturing the industrial ecosystem. Only with a holistic vision, which considers the social, economic and spatial context, can a cybersecurity cluster evolve and grow. Finally, we identify three cybersecurity industry/cluster challenges for the future. First is the persistent cybersecurity workforce shortage—apparent in both countries covered in this report. The second challenge is the resiliency of these high-tech clusters as the hegemony of global cities is expected to diminish post-COVID-19, with the workforce migrating out of expensive and unhealthy urban areas. The third challenge is the durability of the cybersecurity industry itself. Are there too many cybersecurity firms? Will a new generation of technologies reconfigure these firms? In sum, cyber industry cannot be understood in isolation, but only as part of a larger context. Although this industry has some unique features, cybersecurity clusters are not autonomous, and their emergence is connected to a wider technological infrastructure, and to a particular political urban and regional context.

ЗАКОРДОННИЙ ДОСВІД ВИКОРИСТАННЯ АУТСОРСИНГУ

The article examines the foreign experience of the outsourcing process. The analysis of outsourcing development in such countries as: USA, Germany, India, Japan, etc. is carried out. Outsourcing has become widespread due to the development of information systems and technologies. The role of multinational corporations in the development of outsourcing, primarily information technology, is determined and it is noted that American companies use outsourcing as a component of management strategy. Corporations such as Ford, British Petroleum, Procter & Gamble, Dell, Exel and others, due to the use of outsourcing have achieved high economic results: increased profits by almost half by reducing organizational and production costs, improving the overall efficiency of their companies, reengineering. Experts note that today the leader in international outsourcing is India, which accounts for 42.5% of IT outsourcing worldwide. The foundations of India's successful development in the field of information technology outsourcing are the support of the state, whose government since 1970-1980 identified IT as a priority for economic development and created export-production zones with preferential tax regimes. A significant share of the outsourcing market belongs to China, as well as Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia. These countries have a developed infrastructure and a high-tech culture that ensures high quality order fulfillment. Vietnam and Indonesia also have a significant impact on the global outsourcing market, primarily due to more attractive pricing policies. The impact of outsourcing on the economies of countries is noted. The ranking of countries by the degree of development and implementation of outsourcing is studied. According to the ranking, the top 10 countries in the outsourcing market include India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Chile and Colombia. It is worth noting that the leaders of the ranking are the countries of South and Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America. The factors of outsourcing development in the global economy are determined and the influence of human resources on the development of outsourcing in different countries is analyzed. The ways of state support for the development of outsourcing in the countries of the world are determined. In Germany, the High Technology Development Strategy was adopted last year, the main priorities of which are: innovative solutions in the field of digital technologies. The Brazilian government has adopted a new National Strategy for the Development of Science, Technology and Innovation, which aims to reduce the technological gap between Brazil and developed countries. The article also notes that the Ukrainian IT outsourcing industry is actively gaining ground in the global market. The rapid growth of IT outsourcing is due to the prospects, prestige and dynamism of the IT sector in Ukraine.

Preaching in a Post-Truth Era

In this paper, the question of whether Christian preaching is implicated in the growing movement of populism is posed. The paper has identified three critical issues that call for investigation in homiletical hermeneutics. The first issue addresses the problem of biblical interpretation for homiletic practice. The second issue has to do with the impact of social media that often distorts the truth. Alarming dependence on the smart phone suggests that the task of the preacher in this rapidly changing visual and high tech culture is to deliver sermons that are critically aware of visual culture rather than literary culture. Finally, the paper calls for an approach to preaching that seeks to reveal missing, hidden and distorted truth as a way to speak against the demonic power of the profit-driven capitalism and the epidemic of gender-based violence against women and sexual minorities.

TDAH: um sintoma social

Ao longo da história médica a definição e a forma de se definir o diagnóstico do Transtorno do Déficit de Atenção e Hiperatividade (TDAH) culminaram em uma medicalização excessiva e questionável de crianças participantes do cenário educacional. Essa medicalização da vida no ambiente escolar se realiza aliada a um processo histórico e social de normatização imposto pela biopolítica, e, consequentemente, um aumento de diagnósticos visando melhorar o desempenho do aluno. Christoph Türcke ao falar sobre os choques imagéticos auxilia na compreensão do TDAH. Para ele, o choque de imagens apresentadas pelos aparatos audiovisuais exerce uma fascinação estética que, ao fornecer sempre novas imagens, estabelece um espaço mental, em regime de atenção excessiva. Novos padrões de socialização, dessa forma, vão se sedimentando no que se pode denominar de uma mutação subjetiva ligada às imagens e, por conseguinte, medicalizada. Enfim, o TDAH encontra-se nesse espaço em que a criança que possui o déficit de atenção é a criança da cultura atual, denominada por cultura High-tech, em que os sintomas do TDAH são da sociedade contemporânea.

Greening cultural policy

This article focuses on greening cultural policy within a sustainable development context. We examine shortcomings of major public-policy responses to the ecological crisis, linking this to the ambivalent philosophical heritage of anthropocentric worldviews that underpin ideas about the relation of culture to non-human nature. This ambivalence is reflected by weak environmentalism in the cultural policy arena, exemplified by surprisingly non-green cultural platforms espoused by green political parties. Green thinking is further hampered by the widespread adoption of digitisation within cultural organizations, which we contextualise in the broader political economy of digital capitalism and the attendant myth that high-tech culture is a low emissions business. Green cultural policy necessitates intensive self-examination of cultural institutions’ environmental impact, at the same time these institutions deploy art, education, entertainment, sports, and news to raise awareness of ecological crisis and alternative models of economic activity. We cite the efforts of activist artists’ resistance against fossil fuel corporations’ sponsorship of arts and cultural organizations as a welcome provocation for greening cultural policy within cultural organizations and green political parties alike.

Evolution of Fashion Design in the Era of High-Tech Culture

Evolution of Fashion Design in the Era of High-Tech Culture

De-Brogramming the History of Computing [Think Piece

In April 2012, the term brogrammer became part of the national consciousness thanks to a frenzy of media scrutiny kicked off by a Mother Jones article. The piece was meant to sound an alarm about the state of the American high tech culture. In this and other such instances, however, the coverage resulted in an unexpected, violent backlash from the male-dominated gaming and IT communities. The author argues that rather than disregarding these occurrences as fringe incidents, such episodes can show us something about mainstream computing culture. Specifically, refocusing attention on the differences among the less powerful, even the relatively anonymous, can help historians of computing add to the texture and variety of the past. Critically, it will also help avoid assumptions about gender in different national and sociotechnical contexts.

Bodies, Technologies, and Aging in Japan: Thinking About Old People and Their Silver Products

Contemporary Japan is known both for its high tech culture and its rapidly aging population, with 22 % of people currently 65 years and older. Yet there has been little attention to the material culture of the elderly. This paper explores the way aging bodies, official ideology, and consumption of what are called "assistive devices" and "life technologies" come together in the experience of frail old people who depend not only on human caregivers but on "things" such as walkers, kidney dialysis machines, and electric massage chairs. It begins to consider the questions: What technology to aid failing bodies is available, and to whom? How does the advocacy of independence create new forms of consumption? How do "things" mediate ideological change regarding elder care and help to create new understandings of self and one's relation to others? Data come from interviews conducted in 2003-2007 as part of a study of elder care in Japan under the public long term care insurance system that began in 2000. These interviews point both to acceptance of the technology as a way to avoid over-dependence on caregivers, and to resistance to the limitations of aging and to its 21st century definition by the state.

The Right Stuff at the Wrong Time: The Space of Nostalgia in the Conservative Ascendancy

In taking account of Hollywood practice during the Reagan era, Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, in Camera Politica, make the point that the triumphant conservatism of the 1980s, steeped in yearning for redemptive leadership, used the popular arts, especially the cinema, to secure the return of the hero, who combines three essential components of the contemporary conservative social agenda: he is a warrior, an entrepreneur, and a patriarch (219). Unsurprisingly, the film texts that most clearly anticipate this political turn are the violent, hyper-masculine Sylvester Stallone vehicles like the Rocky and Rambo series. But the impulse is also present, if slightly muted, in the George Lucas Star Wars trilogy, particularly The Return of the Jedi (1983), and in the several iterations of Superman (1978-2006) and The Terminator (1984-2009). What is more interesting, however, is that some sci-fi films of this period, not conspicuously right-wing in tendency, easily assimilate to the ideology of free markets, limited government, and traditional values that Donald Critchlow describes in The Conservative Ascendancy. The Right Stuff (198 3), Hollywood's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's non- fiction homage to America's Mercury astronauts, fits this somewhat self- contradictory paradigm almost to perfection. More specifically, the film - far more insistently than the book - overcomes the technophobia latent in social conservatism, making it possible to reconcile unemployed steel workers and born-again Christians to the high-tech culture essential to international free-market capitalism. Both rhetorically and visually, the film argues that small town heroes, spiritual cousins of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontiersmen and Hollywood's favorite cowboys, can out-fly Communists, outwit bureaucrats, and make cutting-edge technology fit their individual creative purposes. Two considerations make it quite ironic that The Right Stuff would tacitly support a right wing political agenda. First, the film's director, Philip Kaufman, is by no means a conservative: he is well known for decidedly antiestablishment films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), which critiques commodity capitalism, and Henry and June (1990), which celebrates the eccentric love affair between Anais Nin and Henry Miller. Secondly, The Right Stuff has as one of its principal protagonists astronaut John Glenn, who by the 1 980s was Senator John Glenn, a prospective Democratic nominee for president in 1984. So decisive seemed this second fact that Newsweek in October, 1983, put John Glenn's filmic impersonator Ed Harris on its cover, while asking, Can a movie help make a president? Reality proved to be the exact opposite of Newweek's implied prediction. Glenn never won the nomination of his party, let alone the presidency, and during the two months following the commercial release of The Right Stuff, President Reagan improved his standing against all Democratic contenders by approximately 7%. In other words, despite Newsweek' s conjectures, The Right Stuff either had no impact whatsoever upon national politics or had an impact in a direction exactly opposite to the one the news magazine had imagined. My analysis resolves this paradox by arguing that The Right Stuff is really more conservative than it appears, implicitly supporting the ideology of crucial to the Reagan administration's political success. But we should quickly add, is a double- sided term, invested with an ambiguity that allows the film to be part of the rebirth of national pride and optimism that President Reagan referred to in his 1984 reelection campaign as morning in America without endorsing the more aggressive heroics of right-wing populism. The word nostalgia is derived from two Greek words, nostos (home) and algia (longing), hence literally a home-longing or for home. From this composite term, Svetlana Boyn in The Future of Nostalgia derives the two faces of nostalgic emotion, a restorative which puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and a reflective nostalgia, which dwells in algia, in longing and loss (41). …

Executable Texts: Programs as Communications Devices and Their Use in Shaping High-Tech Culture

Executable Texts: Programs as Communications Devices and Their Use in Shaping High-Tech Culture

Achieving and Sustaining Institutional Excellence for the First Year of College (review)

MAY/JUNE 2006 ◆ VOL 47 NO 3 363 graphic changes in higher education and discussed the high-tech culture among today’s student population. However, the authors failed to present a deeper analysis of diversity needs such as affordability, cultural perceptions and differences, and family support. The strong technology and administrative background of the authors may be the causes for this inadequacy. Readers may find more on this from another book, Technology Leadership: Communication and Information Systems in Higher Education by Maughan (2001), with a focus how a variety of needs can be accommodated, including those of students, faculty, and administrators. Overall, Higher Education in the Digital Age is a comprehensive book looking backwards into the development and impact of technology on university campuses, and a look forward to implications and possible impacts. As Brian J. Hawkins, President of EDUCAUSE put it, “This book—and especially the last four chapters—is a must read for any senior administrator in higher education today.”

Uncovering the white place: whitewashing at work

Recent work exploring the racialization of place tends to focus on the racialization of marginalized group space. This paper shifts attention toward the racialization of dominant group space, namely, the creation and maintenance of white places. Using the case study of the software workplace, I argue that white places are formed through a process of whitewashing, which simultaneously denies race and superimposes white culture. Whitewashing wields language and invisibility to deny race and promote a particular kind of multiculturalism, while cloaking the workplace in a culture of informality and business politics. The whitewashed workplace, like a whitewashed wall, is seen as colorless rather than white as white culture becomes universalized as high-tech culture. I draw my findings from in-depth interviews on workplace satisfaction, relationships, culture and diversity with black, Asian and white employees in Seattle-area software firms.

The body and communities in cyberspace: A Mmarcellian analysis

Many who speak glowingly about the possibilities for human relations in cyberspace, or virtual communities, laud them precisely because such communities are to a great extent free of the real spatial-temporal restrictions rooted in the limitations of our bodies. In this paper I investigate the importance of the body in establishing and maintaining human relations by considering the thought of the twentieth century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Because Marcel emphasized the central importance of the body in one's personal self-identity as well as in initiating and maintaining intersubjective bonds in human communities, he is able to offer some interesting reflections on the character of virtual communities. I suggest that a number of the features of cyberspace and its communities that make it attractive to many are precisely the characteristics that Marcel would consider detrimental to establishing intimate lasting human communities. I conclude by indicating why I think that Marcel would be concerned that certain trends in our high tech culture may well lead many to prefer ``living'' in virtual, rather than real communities.

Feminist interventions in electronic environments

Recent feminist cultural studies of technology analyze how discourses and practices that circulate in high-tech culture reproduce and enact the same unequal power relations embedded in our institutions and day-to-day activities. Feminist interventions are communicative acts that bring attention to the shifting power relations within a specific discursive context. An analysis of the assumptions about audience that operate in electronic artifacts demonstrates how power relations play out within particular communities. The author argues that enacting feminist interventions in online environments changes the online community's identify and sense of audience, and that creating feminist multimedia can help ensure a more human, diverse and gender balanced human presence in all forms of technology and new media.

Availability of soft technologies and sustainable development

An account is given in this paper of soft technology options which are non-polluting, less energy-intensive and inexpensive to establish. Our endeavor in what follows, has also been to spell out some guidelines and strategies which can easily be adopted for sustaining growth with equity using soft energy options. The soft technologies tend to be employment-generating economically sensible and environmentally-benign. Our evaluation indicates that human survival and development will depend upon (i) whether or not we can harness soft technology options for human welfare, (ii) whether we can or not forestall the serious natural resource and environmental damages perpetuated by the high-tech culture and (iii) whether or not we can develop the appropriate adjustments and/or institutions to share the fruits of technological developments equitably.

Interpersonal communication in high tech culture: Eastern or western?

This study investigates interpersonal communication in a high tech organization to determine whether practices are more Eastern or Western. Information gathered from organizational practice and participant observations comprise the data. The organization emerges significantly Western on seven of nine categories. The external environment, organizational mission, and life cycle stage are offered as explanations for these findings. Results suggest that this organization would not be a suitable candidate for Japanese management practices.