Visceral Connection Research Articles

Does the union always make the force? Group status and recategorization influence the perceived physical formidability of potential coalition groups.

Coalitions among individuals and between groups, which have had critical evolutionary benefits for humans, play an important role in contemporary life. One key element of the processes of assessing potential allies is how they may contribute to the perceived physical formidability - fighting ability or the capacity to inflict costs on others - of the alliance. In three studies, focused for the first time on intergroup coalitions, we investigated how qualities of the groups such as status (social prestige) and the relationship between them influence the perceived physical formidability of a coalition (i.e., European Union, EU). Study 1 found that the inclusion of a group with higher or similar (but not lower) status increased the perceived formidability of the EU. Studies 2 and 3 showed that learning that ingroup members recategorized a low-status group within a common-group identity increased the perceived formidability of the EU including that group, compared with the conditions in which either outgroup members recategorized or no information was provided. Study 3 also revealed mediation by fusion - a visceral connection - with outgroup members, which has been relatively unexplored. Taken together, these studies reveal that both, status and social identity processes, may significantly affect the estimations of coalitional formidability.

Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language ed. by Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari

Reviewed by: Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language ed. by Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari Marc Lynch (bio) Fantetti, Eufemia, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari, editors. Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language. Book*hug, 2021. Essais Series no. 25. CAD $25. Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language is a compilation of twenty-six short essays on the confluences between heritage, language, and [End Page 163] identity. These dynamic essays explore an array of different experiences ranging from the grief that emerges from losing one's mother tongue to the navigation of gendered language in medicine. Connecting all of these diverse experiences is the concept of alienation—the disconnection between father and daughter, loss of one's homeland and culture, the ways that English as a colonial language constricts identities. Each of these essays concerns different ways the body metamorphosizes with language, wrestling with concepts of family, acceptance, disillusionment, and diaspora. All the while, each essay remains fresh due to editors Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari's intuitive organization, which enables a more visceral connection between language, diaspora, displacement, and connectivity. There are quite a few overlaps between essays that, rather than producing repetition, create a thematic resonance. Many of the essays were written or collected during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which becomes a quirky link between disparate experiences and marks a unique historical period. In fact, these subtle connections provide a cohesiveness that isn't typical in essay collections of this kind. Additionally, the majority of the authors occupy marginalized spheres—from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, persons of colour) to LGBTQ2S (Lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, two spirit) to people with disability. The effect is quite extraordinary in terms of how these authors articulate their struggles with language and place as a means of dismantling prevailing notions of normalcy. One of the central thematic threads in the collection is the way the authors submit a challenge directly to readers, asking them to question conventional patterns of reading and publishing that restrict marginalized writers. The authors see these conventions as perpetuating a restrictive system of monolingualism under the argument that having multiple languages in a text would make said text restrictive and inaccessible; contrary to this assumption, Tongues shows just how rich and engaging a multi-lingual text can be. The authors' connection with language (whether native or ancestral) becomes an entry point for readers, and the linguistic variations a site of intrigue that is both metaphorically expansive and generative. These types of conventions, therefore, eliminate some of the readers' responsibility, particularly as it comes to bilingual authors and the reduced poetic, linguistic, and imaginative potentialities that they can bring to the table. Rebecca Fisseha, for example, discusses how using italics to signal foreignness as a standard of practice does nothing more than refuse difference and serve privilege. Similarly, writer Ashley Hynd grapples with the difficult moral space the reader occupies, asking to whom is the translator responsible: general readers or specific communities? This concept provocatively overlaps with the struggles [End Page 164] BIPOC authors face, given that they are often intrinsically at odds with the white, cis, male reader: as Carrianne Leung, a writer who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Scarborough, tells us, "We know the enormity of what we are writing against. The readers are sometimes locked in their own world of mythology. This narrative that arrives from my body may already be at odds with the reader's mythology" (175). Although these essayists are not responding to each other, they all speak to larger modes of diminishment and suggest that the repression of bodies themselves is not just the product of the forced adoption of a colonial language (English, French, Spanish, etc.) but is part and parcel of the publishing industry's standards of practice. In terms of its geographic scope, Tongues captures a large number of diasporic perspectives, particularly those connected to global movement and migration. Many of the essays articulate the complications of a conflicted sense of identity that is in flux because of a diverse set of histories and contexts. Often, the writers enunciate a deep sense of conflict; they suggest that...

The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez (review)

Reviewed by: The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez Horacio Sierra THE CUBAN VOTE. By Carmen Pelaez. Directed by Loretta Greco. Colony Theater, Miami New Drama, Miami Beach. April 22, 2022. Carmen Pelaez’s The Cuban Vote demonstrated just how vital regional theatre is and how well it is able to reflect the realities of local communities and the sociopolitical discourses they sustain. Inspired in equal measure by the international attention Miami’s Cuban American community garners every election cycle, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and the snappy writing of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, Pelaez’s play buzzed with urgent energy and left the audience pealing with laughter at jokes that lampooned the three-ring circus that is Miami’s political scene. But just as the retort “Fidel Castro is dead”—delivered deadpan by the play’s main character, Carolina Clarens (Carmen Pelaez) when she was being interviewed by a right-wing, Spanish-language radio host—sent shudders through the audience, The Cuban Vote takes everyone to task for the political mayhem of the last twenty years. Liberals, conservatives, candidates, political consultants, mainstream media, social media, naïve Cuban Americans nostalgic for pre-Castro community, cynical Cuban Americans who are “over the whole Castro thing,” and every disengaged Miamian in between are all held to account. Carolina is an intelligent and wonky candidate for mayor of Miami-Dade county. Despite having managed the office of a former mayor, who also happens to have been her father, Carolina is faltering in the polls. With a skeleton crew consisting of her seen-it-all mother, Ofelia (Evelyn Perez), and social media influencer sister, Blanca (Marcela Paguaga), the campaign needs help. Blanca’s boyfriend, the obnoxiously charming bitcoin bro Benji Carbonell (Kristian Bikic), is eager to wed Blanca. But Blanca [End Page 87] has informed Benji that her mother won’t consent to the marriage until Carolina is elected mayor. Benji calls in a favor from a Miami native, Alex Mesa (Andhy Mendez), who has made a name for himself in Washington, DC as a slick political consultant. Benji pays Alex’s salary to ensure Carolina wins her campaign and Benji can marry Blanca. After Alex convinces another formidable candidate not to enter the race, he realizes how unlikable Carolina is. To offer voters a clear contrast between Carolina’s governing prowess and the clueless schmucks who usually dominate Miami’s political scene, he recruits a drunk viejo sitting at a bar, the scene-stealing Gilberto Ruiz (Jonathan Nichols-Navarro), to run for office. Gilberto—a character clearly inspired by the Christopher Sly lark at the beginning of Taming of the Shrew—believes he has what it takes to be mayor. The play soon amps up the didacticism as it serves up a cautionary tale with which we are all too familiar: experience, merit, and know-how are often overshadowed by superficial showmanship. Especially in a city as flashy as Miami. Click for larger view View full resolution Andhy Mendez (Alex Mesa), Carmen Pelaez (Carolina Clarens), and Kristian Bikic (Benji Carbonell) in The Cuban Vote. Photo: Stian Roenning. Pelaez’s keen appreciation for the local vernacular of Miami’s Cuban American community not only makes for great jokes, it also underscores regional theatre’s ability to offer representation to communities that are often excluded from Broadway and from canonical theatre that is deemed to be representative of the American experience. As The Cuban Vote makes clear, political machinations, ambitious individuals, and falling in love, may be universal, but the way in which these themes are expressed have more power when the audience feels a visceral connection to them. For example, a popular meme riffs on how Hispanic communities will take someone’s insecurity (big nose, skinny, red-headed) and make it a loving nickname (narizón, flaco, peliroja, respectively). The double-edged sword of such nicknames is on display in The Cuban Vote when Gilberto continually disparages Carolina by calling her “la gorda” (the fat woman) during interviews. In response to a debate question about climate change and rising sea levels, Gilberto’s anti-intellectualism is subsumed by his callousness: “Let the seas rise. I float! [To Carolina] Especially...

O menino da sua mãe: alguns aspectos da caracterização da figura materna na mitologia grega

There are several mythical representations of the visceral connection of mothers to their children, transmitted by the Greek and Latin literary tradition. This text aims to present some of them based on two distinct themes: 1) motherhood as a threat to the world of men; and 2) the mother’s experience of losing her children. The textual corpus under discussion includes excerpts from Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

Exhibition Review: Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970

Exhibition Review: <i>Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970</i>

‘An invention…that bottled up a memory, like scent’: phantom fragrances in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

ABSTRACT In the opening chapters of Rebecca, du Maurier’s unnamed narrator makes a poignant remark about her desire to re-experience certain memories: ‘If only there could be an invention … that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale’. Although her suitor curtly dismisses this comment, readers should not be as quick to forget the tie that the narrator draws between memory and scent. In this article, I argue that fragrance is not an insignificant detail of du Maurier’s story but rather an emotively charged presence that can help readers better understand the relationship between the narrator and the first Mrs. de Winter. After discussing neurological and anthropological studies that have emerged around smell’s connection to memory and liminality, I explore moments in du Maurier’s text where fragrances reanimate Rebecca and create a visceral connection between the protagonist and this deceased yet very much present character. By examining the way Rebecca rises to the surface through smell, I ultimately show that odours play a pivotal role in allowing readers to recognize how her forceful and resilient personality continues to dismantle the boundaries of patriarchal control from beyond the grave.

Connecting to the World: Christopher Alexander’s Tool for Human-Centered Design

Beauty connects us viscerally to the material universe. Life forms evolved to experience biological connectedness as an absolute necessity for survival. Starting one century ago, however, dominant culture deliberately reversed the mechanism responsible for visceral connection. The resulting disconnection from the material world will continue to have long-lasting negative consequences for human well-being. Christopher Alexander describes how to revive the visceral connecting process, creating conditions for human-centered design in our times. Biological connectedness arises from an organic projection of the designer’s “self” onto the material reality of the object being designed, and to its physical context. Exploring multiple scenarios using informational feedback avoids letting the designer’s ego or imposed images exert a controlling influence. Implementing Alexander’s connecting method could revolutionize design, with the potential to produce a new, nourishing art and architecture. Recent developments in biophilia and neuro-design help to better understand Alexander’s ideas, using results not available at the time he was developing his theory.

Portraying in Film the Mythology of Child-Related Litigation

ABSTRACTA veteran attorney and filmmaker discusses the lessons for both separating parents and divorce professionals alike contained in his Telly Award-winning short film, Talk to Strangers. The film forges a visceral connection with its audience in the plight of a brother and sister put at risk by a court-administered custody evaluation process. Applying a variety of filmic techniques and an unusual perspective to the toxicity of high-conflict litigation, Talk to Strangers debunks the myths on which separating parents and even divorce professionals rely in countenancing avoidable child-related litigation. The film’s unique power derives from an engaging story rooted in the experience of its attorney producers, stellar performances by its child actors, and an original score cowritten by a Grammy-winning composer.

War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era ed. by Joan E. Cashin

Reviewed by: War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era ed. by Joan E. Cashin Christine E. Sears War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era. Edited by Joan E. Cashin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [xiv], 263. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4320-5; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4319-9.) The ten authors in Joan E. Cashin’s pithily named War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era demonstrate the potential richness of marrying Civil War studies with material culture. The essays range from prewar to postwar, from pikes to lymph, and from personal belongings to landscapes. They aim to illuminate common soldiers’ experiences, women’s support of political ideology, and plain folks’ loyalty to the Confederacy. Some brilliantly show what the material turn offers. Others offer a less object-centric analysis, though they nevertheless extend our understanding of Civil War culture. Jason Phillips and Peter S. Carmichael tease out how the same objects conveyed different meanings to different communities. Phillips explores how the “things that captivated Americans when they anticipated civil war mattered” (p. 24). In 1857, John Brown commissioned pikes consisting of bowie knives affixed to hoe handles and shipped them separately to avoid detection. Bowie knives bespoke progress and expansion, while pikes were linked with the “overthrow of aristocracy” (p. 17). To Brown and his followers, pikes were the “harbinger of the modern insurrection” (p. 19). Secessionist Edmund Ruffin saw not pikes but spears wielded by savages who must be answered by southern white revolt. Relics collected at war’s end suggested how contemporaries “understood Union victory and the downfall of the Confederacy,” according to Carmichael in his chapter, “The Trophies of Victory and the Relics of Defeat: Returning Home in the Spring of 1865” (p. 201). Soldiers of both armies shredded an Appomattox apple tree into splinters because Robert E. Lee lingered long under the tree’s shade waiting for Ulysses S. Grant’s reply to his surrender. For Confederates, a tree sliver denoted “a sacred link to the incomparable Robert E. Lee” and proved that the soldier had stuck with Lee to the end (p. 204). For Union soldiers, the splinters paid “tribute to a complete and smashing victory” they earned in the Army of the Potomac (p. 203). Certainly, Carmichael’s impressive reflection on the “material culture of defeat,” which shows how war souvenirs collected in a “spirit of reconciliation” later stirred “feelings of white solidarity,” will interest many scholars (pp. 217, 218). Cashin looks at how white southerners laid claim to the legacy of the American Revolution through objects and landscapes. A surfeit of Revolutionary War artifacts changed how people interacted with those objects. In 1858, a farmer in South Carolina found and had repaired a British musket, which he then utilized. Cashin posits that the farmer and others who manipulated Revolutionary items did not respect those objects. This merits more [End Page 914] exploration. Perhaps the farmer felt a visceral connection to a Revolutionary past each time he raised that weapon. Sarah Jones Weicksel highlights conflict between refugees and white reformers over refugees’ living conditions in “Fitted Up for Freedom: The Material Culture of Refugee Relief.” Freedpeople asserted control over their built environment, constructing dwellings out of the mismatched materials available. Relief workers read the haphazard temporary housing as indicative of external and internal disorder. In “Nature as Material Culture: Antietam National Battlefield,” Lisa M. Brady and Timothy Silver trace Antietam’s landscape from the area’s prehistory to the National Park Service’s attempt to “stop time” at Civil War battlefields, “transforming the living, material world into static, cultural sites” (p. 54). The authors consider how the site shaped the battle and how the fighting strained the landscape “to its ecological limits” (p. 55). Other contributors use textual sources to reveal objects’ meanings. Earl J. Hess offers a needed corrective to the view that all nineteenth-century men had extensive experience with guns. In fact, few Union or Confederate soldiers were “gun-adept” (p. 104). Only the “gun-adept” forged bonds with their weapons; others were glad to ditch their weapons at war’s end. Ronald J. Zboray...

Water is life – an indigenous perspective from a Standing Rock Water Protector

This chapter is structured as a dialogic engagement. Dialogue presents itself as more compatible with the exploratory, flowing character of water and with the preferred rhetorical approach of an indigenous mode of discourse. Speaking from a Lakota perspective, and specifically female perspective, Jewett situates the concept of water commons within a wider narrative of oppression, which is both gendered and racist. The control of water is equated with the drive to control women, indigenous ‘others’, and material and cultural resources more generally. The specific cultural perspective she expresses centres on notions of water as a relative to which/whom we must relate in a mutual engagement of care and responsibility. We are within a living web of beings dependent on each other and intimately connected to each other. Water cannot but be a communal phenomenon connecting the individual to all of life across space and to our ancestors and descendants across time. Water flows in and out of us. This sense of visceral connection with water is exemplified in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota pipeline. The re-affirmation of indigenous perspectives revived by this engagement is explored and the argument made that the recovery of these primary modes of relating to natural elements is crucial to healing current ecological and social stresses.

Morir y matar por un grupo o unos valores. Estrategias para evitar, reducir y/o erradicar el comportamiento grupal extremista

Two theoretical approaches have been recently proposed to explain why some individuals are willing to die and kill for their group or for their beliefs. Identity fusion is a visceral connection with a group that predicts willingness to perform extreme behavior for the group. Sacred values theory suggests that some people have a visceral connection with a value that makes them consider that value as sacred, and predicts willingness for costly sacrifices for such values. The Devoted Actors model postulates that those who hold certain sacred values and that are fused with the group that shares such values will be willing to conduct sacrifices exceptionally costly and extreme for their beliefs and for their group. The current paper analyzes these theories and the Devoted Actors model from a point of view of their relation to terrorism.

Understanding the semiotics of sensory perception using experiential research

In recent years we have seen the proliferation in culture involving immersive sensory experiences. From the Tate Sensorium to Secret Cinema, people increasingly seek to make a deep, unexpected and visceral connection to the world around them.

Brand: Modern Realty Transferss Iconic Dimension

Any real estate project branded [Product Type] is better positioned in marketing circles than equivalent projects lacking that association.* The preceding sentence reminds you that real estate is a consumer product in one seminal respect. Brand, even in real property development, reflects upon the lifestyles of persons shopping, eating, working and sojourning in a unique place. Development projects today need branding to differentiate themselves from other places and to message to potential shoppers, consumers, tenants or buyers what it's like to engage in a dynamic environment or to enjoy the creative energy of fellow occupants or the surrounding neighborhood. Messaging has much to say about the image and reputation of a commercial property – and the expected momentum of the project's lease-out or unit sales. It creates an emotional, visceral connection with shoppers, travelers, workers or whomever is the target of the experience narrative. Such vital components of those images and messages that cumulatively constitute the of a real estate development must follow ownership or leasing of the project. This paper identifies all the critical branding elements, discusses how in this digital age they are registered (secured) in their creators, and how (and why) future use of those elements must be secured by the buyer or the ground tenant – whomever is the transferee of the physical project. As new means of expression such as Memes and GIFs, followed by emoticons, populate the branding realm, the practitioner must stay on her toes to advise transferees of their burdens of due diligence and securing rights in the brand. This paper suggests the proper path to transferees' ongoing rights to control the brand elements beyond closing on the concurrent real property transaction. *If you doubt this proposition, consult Donald Trump for his view. This abstract itself tests the power of the surname Trump to secure views and downloads of the accompanying paper.

Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters by Frye Gaillard (review)

Reviewed by: Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters by Frye Gaillard Mike Bunn Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters. By Frye Gaillard. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2015. 128 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 9781588383129. If there is any genre of book that seems to consistently fall short of its potential in American historiography, it is the published collection of Civil War letters. We seem to have thousands of these volumes floating [End Page 370] about, each loaded with buried nuggets of golden quotes surrounded by layers of tedious recounting of the monotony of camp life in bad grammar, all introduced by authors with rather formulaic overviews of the progression of the Civil War. While these books have their place as reference resources regardless of their eloquence and have certainly been invaluable to generations of historians in understanding the conflict through the eyes of the men who fought it, as narratives they usually leave much to be desired. Frye Gaillard’s provocative and refreshingly brief book, Journey to the Wilderness, happily rises above that stereotype. It is an enlightening and readable chronological story focusing on one family’s experience during and memory of one of our nation’s defining events. Gaillard’s success in weaving fragmented correspondence and memories together into a compelling narrative should come as no surprise, as he is currently Writer-in-Residence at the University of South Alabama and author of nearly two dozen acclaimed books, including Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America (Tuscaloosa, 2004) and The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir (Montgomery, 2012). While this is his first foray into Civil War history specifically, he has a wealth of experience in writing about the cultural heritage of the South in general. He is ably assisted in the undertaking via a superb foreword by colleague Steven Trout, director of the Center for the Study of War and Memory at USA, which sets the tone for the book by asking how the grisly reality of the war could have so long been downplayed in place of more romantic remembrances. Gaillard features a carefully selected and closely edited batch of his family’s correspondence in the book which he combines with his own lucid commentary, providing both historical context and background on the way the experiences of the writers were collectively remembered by their descendants. In the letters he finds many of the usual expressions of initial optimism for the war as some sort of grand adventure fade into a grim determination to survive its horrors; evidence of both the thrill of participation in epoch–defining events and the drudgery of camp life; attempts to deal with separation from loved ones and heartrending loss; bitter racism; and even cowardice. While this is the Civil War we as historians are familiar with today, as Gaillard candidly observes, it is [End Page 371] not necessarily the Civil War he remembered hearing about as a child. Gaillard notes that his generation (he was born in 1946) was perhaps the last to be raised with stories of unequivocal southern gallantry during the affair but also the first to be forced to square that veneration with the glaring inequities in southern history forcefully brought to light by the Civil Rights movement. The experience of being caught in that cultural whiplash challenged his notions of what the South he grew up in and was taught to love and respect was all about, indeed by extension what he himself was all about, and prompted this objective look into what it was really like to live through the Civil War. The unusually compelling result both sheds light on the lives of otherwise largely forgotten individuals and, on a small scale, illuminates how southerners’ visceral connection with the war has often blurred the lines between history and regional identity. As Gaillard thoughtfully illustrates, that blend of past and present has been a powerful force in southern culture for a long time and continues to have meaning to us today. Journey to the Wilderness is an entertaining and insightful book that those interested in the Civil War and the broader...

Audio Storytelling

Audio storytelling is booming. From crafted, long-form documentaries to short digital narratives, podcasting, social media and online streaming have liberated audio from the confines of a live radio schedule and created huge new transnational audiences. But how can the burgeoning influence of audio storytelling be harnessed in educational and community sectors? This article examines an initiative designed to advance the use of audio storytelling in educational contexts: the emotional history project, an intensive teaching model that trains undergraduate students with no prior audio experience to create powerful short audio stories in a 4 x 3 hour module. It relies on the capacity of audio to convey emotion, and the power of emotion to transcend social, cultural and racial differences and forge a visceral connection. By gathering deeply personal emotional moments, students not only have a heightened incentive to learn technical production skills, they are also motivated to consider ethical issues and vital principles of empathy and responsibility.

Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes

Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes

Teetering Towards Economic Sustainability: Alternatives for Commercial Fishermen

Sustainable fishing has become a challenging problem for commercial fishermen all over the world. Many efforts to pursue a livelihood based on commercially harvesting fish suffer from catch limits and closings intended to protect diminishing fish resources; rising prices for waterfront real estate that currently houses their home ports; and competition from recreational fishermen. In order to continue a commercial fishing way of life, fishermen are resorting to what they are told represent economic sustainable alternatives to fishing, including aquaculture, retail markets, educational/museum facilities, restaurants, and parks. Yet, can a fisherman remain a fisherman if he is seen as an ‘artist in residence’ in an educational facility or a farmer tending his tilapia? Are these truly economically sustainable alternatives to fishing or merely ways of maintaining a visceral connection to our maritime heritage and as such offer little to the fishermen in terms of maintaining their way of life? This paper explores a case study with fishermen in Belford, New Jersey, and suggests fisherman can be willing to become part of a new vision for the area and how some are surprisingly comfortable with the creation of an educational/ museum facility as a way to keep fishing in Belford.

O uso inconsciente da tecnologia no cotidiano

It is through the mediation of computer technology that we build our relationship with the world, by using the connections – whether wireless or not – in our everyday life. These technologies have been used without a great effort, and almost in a transparent way, in lots of our everyday tasks. They are present in the objects that we carry in our own pockets – such as the cell phone, credit cards, or public transport cards – and in products and services used by people around the planet in spite of our deep cultural and socioeconomic disparities. If on the one hand, the use of the computational and telecommunication systems became more accessible and popular, on the other hand its operation mechanisms became more invisible, complex and sophisticated. That situation is giving space to what we call “the unconscious use of technology”, characterized both by the ignorance about the technological process related to the operation of the equipments and services which we use daily, and by our lack of awareness about our intimate and visceral connection with technology. Under the lights of an absolutely unpredictable future – that will be shaped by the intense desire with which we seek forms of connection and communication increasingly fast, expressive and that have multimedia characteristics – we will expose in this article a synthesis of the contemporary scene characterized by the ubiquity and mobility of our computer systems, discuss the unconscious and everyday use of technology and point out some possible ways of researching and developing products, services and systems in the design field. Keywords: design, digital technology, society, everyday life.

The unconscious use of technology in everyday life

E atraves da mediacao das tecnologias computacionais que hoje construimos nossa relacao com o mundo, nas conexoes – com ou sem fio – de nosso cotidiano. Essas tecnologias vem sendo utilizadas sem grande esforco, e de forma quase transparente, em muitas de nossas tarefas cotidianas, embutidas nos objetos que carregamos em nossos proprios bolsos – tais como o celular, os cartoes de credito ou os cartoes para ingresso em transporte publico – e em produtos e servicos utilizados por bilhoes de pessoas ao redor do planeta, a despeito de nossas profundas disparidades culturais e socioeconomicas. E se, por um lado, o uso de sistemas computacionais e de telecomunicacao torna-se cada vez mais acessivel, popular, facil e simples, por outro, seus mecanismos de funcionamento tornam-se cada vez mais invisiveis, complexos e sofisticados. Tal situacao vem dando lugar ao que denominamos de “uso inconsciente da tecnologia”, caracterizado tanto pelo desconhecimento parcial ou completo dos processos tecnologicos relativos ao funcionamento dos aparelhos e servicos dos quais fazemos uso cotidianamente, quanto por nossa falta de consciencia em relacao a nossa intima e visceral ligacao com a tecnologia. A luz de um futuro absolutamente imprevisivel – a ser moldado pela avidez com que hoje buscamos formas de conexao e de comunicacao cada vez mais velozes, expressivas e multimidiaticas – neste artigo apresentamos uma sintese do cenario contemporâneo caracterizado pela ubiquidade e mobilidade dos sistemas computacionais, discutimos o uso inconsciente e cotidiano da tecnologia, e apontamos alguns possiveis caminhos para a pesquisa e desenvolvimento de produtos, servicos e sistemas de natureza digital, no campo do Design. Palavras-chave: design, tecnologia digital, sociedade, cotidiano.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

This article considers the important role of archival photographs in the work of historians, artists and writers of the generation after the Holocaust. Powerful “points of memory” linking past and present, memory and postmemory, individual remembrance and cultural recall, photographs can offer evidence of past crimes and function as haunting specters that enable an affective visceral connection to the past. And yet, photographs may also be limited and flawed historical documents, promising more than they can actually reveal. The article argues that such ambiguous evidence may be a resource for historians seeking to grasp and transmit the past's emotional truth.