Étiquette : contemporary culture

Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

Publié le Publié dans Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 commentaires
Symbolic illustration of walkers moving through time and culture, featuring human silhouettes and clock-headed figures on a light background, evoking memory, transmission, and human presence in a networked world.

Read this article in French:
Habiter le réseau — Une nouvelle condition humaine dans la culture mondiale

When the Network Becomes a Place of Sharing, Memory, and Culture

For a long time, the Internet was regarded as a tool. A tool for communication, research, learning, and distribution. This view remains largely true. Yet over the decades, the network has become far more than a simple tool.

Today, an increasing part of human experience unfolds within the network. We learn there, exchange ideas there, create there, preserve memories there, share knowledge there, and meet people we may never encounter in person. Works of art, ideas, emotions, and human traces now circulate on a global scale.

The network is no longer merely a tool that we use from time to time. It has become a space that we inhabit.

The Network Walker

Every day, billions of people move through the network. They travel from a text to an image, from a photograph to a work of art, from a song to a scientific article, from a personal memory to a historical event. They journey through landscapes of knowledge, cultures, and memories.

I have previously used the expression “Network Walker” to describe this experience. It still seems relevant to me today.

The Network Walker explores. Discovers. Learns. Connects ideas that sometimes originate from different cultures, eras, or continents. They move through a vast environment whose boundaries can never be fully known.

There is a form of contemporary nomadism in this experience. We move from one work to another, from one body of knowledge to another, from one memory to another. We sometimes engage in a kind of cultural wandering through the texts, images, archives, stories, and conversations that make up the global network. Along this journey, we cross cultures, languages, and territories scattered across all continents. Without leaving our place of residence, we travel through a human memory that has become global. This proximity to works, stories, and sensibilities from elsewhere encourages a form of cultural blending on a worldwide scale.

As in any cultural environment, our journey is influenced by many factors. Search engines, platforms, recommendation systems, and algorithms all contribute to organizing the paths we follow. Yet we retain the ability to choose our directions, take detours, explore unexpected routes, and retrace our steps. We remain human beings capable of curiosity, judgment, and reflection.

The Network Witness

As we continue to move through the network, we also become witnesses. Women and men of all ages, living in different cultures and regions of the world, observe the transformations unfolding in our time.

We witness the emergence of new forms of creation, new ways of communicating, and new ways of transmitting human memory. We observe how works circulate, how ideas travel, and how technologies gradually transform cultural practices.

Over the years, I have witnessed many human transformations made visible through the network. I have seen people who struggled with writing push themselves to improve their literacy in order to participate in online exchanges. I have seen individuals break their isolation by taking part in social life through digital networks. I have seen hundreds of poets share their texts with readers scattered across several continents. I have seen thousands of artists publish drawings, paintings, photographs, and digital works. I have seen people discover cultural, social, and geopolitical realities to which they would probably never have been exposed before.

These experiences gradually convinced me that the network is more than a technical infrastructure. It has become a space of encounter, transmission, learning, and participation in an ever-evolving global culture.

For more than three decades, I have observed these transformations. I witnessed the first websites, the first search engines, the emergence of social networks, and later the arrival of algorithms and conversational artificial intelligences.

Over time, I came to understand that the network was no longer simply a tool for communication or distribution. It was gradually becoming a global cultural space where knowledge, works, memories, and human experiences intersect.

Like many others, I have been in turn a Network Walker, a Network Witness, and an inhabitant of the network, eventually becoming a citizen of the network.

Inhabiting the Network

Using a tool and inhabiting a place are two different experiences.

We use a tool to accomplish a task. We inhabit a place when it becomes part of our daily existence.

For a significant part of humanity, the network has become a place of sharing, memory, and culture. Friendships are born there. Communities develop there. Works circulate there. Knowledge is transmitted there. A portion of global collective memory is built there day after day.

For many people, the network has also become a place of encounter and belonging. Connections are formed between individuals who might never otherwise have met. Communities emerge around shared interests, passions, causes, and cultural practices. The network also provides access to a considerable part of global culture: works, knowledge, archives, testimonies, and creations now circulate on an unprecedented scale. This possibility of meeting, learning, and participating also contributes to making the network an inhabited space.

Inhabiting the network does not mean abandoning the physical world. It means recognizing that contemporary human experience now unfolds simultaneously in physical spaces and digital spaces.

The Citizen of the Network

If the network becomes an inhabited place, then a question naturally arises: how should we behave within it?

This is where the figure of the Citizen of the Network emerges.

I do not use this expression in a legal sense. There is no global government of the network and no universal digital passport. I use the concept in a cultural and ethical sense.

To be a Citizen of the Network is to recognize that we participate in a shared space and in a constantly evolving planetary culture.

It is choosing to transmit knowledge rather than simply consume information.

It is creating.

It is engaging in dialogue.

It is preserving a measure of humanity within digital spaces.

It is also using contemporary tools, including artificial intelligence, responsibly.

A New Human Condition

Humanity has already experienced major cultural transformations. Writing, the printing press, mass media, and the Internet profoundly changed the circulation of ideas and knowledge.

Today, a new stage is emerging.

The printing press enabled the dissemination of books on an unprecedented scale. Mass media accelerated the circulation of information and culture. The Internet made it possible to connect people, works, and knowledge across the globe. Today, artificial intelligence contributes in turn to this evolution by helping organize, interpret, and circulate the content that makes up our cultural environment.

Throughout my life, I have witnessed several of these transformations. I grew up in a world where culture circulated primarily through books, newspapers, libraries, museums, and face-to-face encounters. Later, I saw the emergence of computers, the Internet, search engines, social networks, and conversational artificial intelligences. This historical continuity reminds me that technologies change, but the human need to transmit, learn, create, and share remains.

What is changing is not only the way information circulates. Our relationships, our memory, our attention, and our experience of the world are changing as well.

We are gradually becoming the inhabitants of a global networked culture.

We are at once walkers who explore, witnesses who observe, inhabitants who live within this environment, and citizens who participate in its construction.

Inhabiting the network is not merely about using technologies. It is about learning to share, transmit, create, and preserve a human presence in an increasingly interconnected world.

We are the first conscious inhabitants of a global networked culture.

🔷 CONTINUE THE REFLECTION

→ Human Traces in Global Culture
Memory, transmission, and presence in a networked world.

→ The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age
Culture, knowledge, emotions, and human experience in a connected world.

→ Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture, and Everyday Life in a Networked World
Understanding how algorithms already participate in shaping our daily cultural environment.

→ From Humanist Digital Art to the Algorithmic Artwork-Site
A synthesis of the principal concepts developed throughout the theoretical corpus.

→ Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
An overview of the philosophical foundations of Humanist Digital Art.

Illustration numérique représentant « Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker », une silhouette humaine avec une horloge en guise de tête, évoquant la traversée de la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique / Digital illustration representing “Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker,” a human silhouette with a clock as a head, evoking the traversal of global culture in the algorithmic age.

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture and Everyday Life in a Networked World

Publié le Publié dans Réflexions sur l’artÉtiqueté , , , , , , , , , , , , 11 commentaires

We Are Already Living in an Algorithmic Culture

Silhouette of a walker moving through an environment saturated with digital platforms, algorithms, and media flows in a contemporary dripping aesthetic.

Read this article in French:
Tout le monde utilise l’IA — Art, culture et vie quotidienne dans un monde en réseau

A Technology Already Integrated into Everyday Life

Since the arrival of conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, many people have the impression that artificial intelligence has suddenly entered our lives. Yet different forms of AI have already been present in our daily lives for many years.

We use AI when we search the Internet, follow a GPS route, when streaming platforms suggest films or music, or when social networks automatically organize the posts that appear in our news feeds. Online shopping platforms, voice assistants, automatic translation, recommendation systems, editing tools, and even many health applications already rely on forms of artificial intelligence.

AI is no longer a technology of the future.
It has gradually become an invisible infrastructure of contemporary everyday life.

A Gradual Evolution of the Web and Digital Platforms

I have been observing the evolution of the web and digital culture since the early days of the Internet in the 1990s. I witnessed the emergence of the first search engines, the beginnings of social networks, digital platforms and, gradually, the arrival of algorithmic systems that now organize a large part of global cultural circulation.

This shift did not happen suddenly. It developed slowly, almost silently, until it became an integrated part of contemporary daily life.

Today, this reality affects almost every area of society: work, education, communications, media, commerce, transportation, health, research, culture and the arts.

It is already changing the way many professions function on a daily basis. Teachers use writing and research assistance tools, cultural workers depend on digital platforms to distribute their content, companies automate certain administrative tasks, and creators use recommendation systems to reach their audiences.

Media, Journalism and Culture in the Algorithmic Environment

Even professions related to information, communication and media are now evolving within this digital environment where platforms, search engines and algorithmic systems occupy an increasingly important place.

We can also see this in journalism, where journalists already use writing assistance tools, automatic transcription systems, intelligent search engines and platforms that personalize the circulation of information. In newsrooms, algorithms now influence content visibility, the speed of dissemination and sometimes even the way topics reach the public.

Art and culture do not evolve outside the contemporary world. They are transforming within the same digital and algorithmic environment that is already reshaping our daily habits.

Today, digital platforms play a major role in our cultural experience. Recommendation systems help organize what we discover, watch, listen to and share. Search engines also influence the visibility of artworks, artists, articles and ideas.

The deepest role of AI may not simply be to produce images, texts or music. It also lies in its ability to silently organize global cultural circulation.

Visibility in Algorithmic Culture

We are already living in an algorithmic culture.

This does not mean that algorithms completely control our lives or that humanity is disappearing. But it does mean that many aspects of our experience of the world now pass through systems of calculation, recommendation, filtering and personalization.

This presence sometimes becomes almost invisible because it gradually integrates itself into our habits. Like the Internet before it, AI is slowly ceasing to be perceived as a spectacular novelty and is becoming a normalized everyday environment.

We may be entering a period comparable to the post-digital era: a moment when technology ceases to be exceptional because it has already become part of the ordinary cultural landscape.

For younger generations, digital platforms, automated recommendations and algorithmic systems no longer represent a technological novelty, but simply a normal part of the cultural environment in which they are growing up.

Today, even people who claim to distrust artificial intelligence often use, sometimes without fully realizing it, platforms, search engines, social networks and digital systems that already rely on various forms of algorithms and AI.

It is possible to reject certain uses of conversational AI or to question its development. But it becomes more difficult to claim that we live completely outside these technological environments, since digital platforms and algorithmic systems are now an integral part of contemporary everyday life.

This situation nevertheless raises several important questions. Algorithmic systems sometimes tend to favor content that generates rapid attention, strong emotional reactions or constant engagement. Personalized recommendations can also reduce certain forms of spontaneous discovery and encourage a gradual homogenization of cultural tastes.

In this context, visibility itself becomes a major cultural issue.

What is not recommended circulates less.
What circulates less sometimes becomes almost invisible.

Artists, writers, journalists, creators and cultural organizations must now evolve within environments where the circulation of content increasingly depends on digital platforms and algorithmic systems.

Human Presence in an Automated World

But this transformation is not only about technology. It also concerns the way we inhabit the contemporary world.

As systems become more automatic, more fluid and more integrated into everyday life, certain human dimensions seem to acquire a new value: real presence, attention, slowness (human time), critical thinking, human relationships, emotion, memory and lived experience.

Algorithmic systems did not appear on their own. They also reflect the choices, values and orientations of the societies that develop them.

The more algorithmic the world becomes, the more precious human presence becomes.

Artificial intelligence will probably continue to profoundly transform contemporary societies. The arts, media and culture will also continue to evolve within this networked environment where humans, platforms and algorithmic systems now permanently coexist.

But despite these transformations, one thing remains essential: behind screens, data and algorithms, there are still human beings who create, search, doubt, feel and try to give meaning to the world they are moving through.

The digital is not the subject.
The human being is.

It is humanity that created technologies, including artificial intelligence, to extend its capacities, share knowledge and continue transforming the world it inhabits.

🔷 SEE ALSO

→ The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age

→ The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms Organizing Global Culture

→ Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments

→ About the Author

→ Human Traces in Global Culture

→ Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

Illustration numérique représentant « Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker », une silhouette humaine avec une horloge en guise de tête, évoquant la traversée de la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique / Digital illustration representing “Le marcheur du réseau / The Network Walker,” a human silhouette with a clock as a head, evoking the traversal of global culture in the algorithmic age.

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor