Abstract

SEVERIANO, MARIA DE FÁTIMA VIEIRA. SOCIAL ACCELERATION AND DIGITAL CULTURE. NEW FORMS OF DOMINATION. Rev. Comunic [online]. 2017, vol.24, n.2, pp.83-101. ISSN 2238-121X.  https://doi.org/10.15600/2238-121X/comunicacoes.v24n2p83-101.

Throughout the past centuries, the enlightenment concept of progress has ended an optimism as to the future of the Human species: the belief that the advances of science, technique and reason would not only improve the objective conditions of mens lives, but it would also respond to the aspirations for subjective well-being, happiness and emancipation. Currently, a time is lived in which the digital world has reached exponential levels of growth, producing a compression of time and space which enables labor automation and the accomplishment of human tasks in a simultaneous and borderless ways. However, the “technological progress” has not been converted into “humanitarian progress” (MARCUSE, 1980). In this context, this paper proposes a reflection about the new temporalities in the digital culture context through a critical theory perspective, questioning the current experience of time acceleration in individuals’ life pace and its implications to emancipation. It also privileges a reflection about the repercussions of current psychosocial free time regulation as a form of social domination from two perspectives: the consumerism culture which has transformed free time into a fetishized consuming object integrating it to the labor production logic and the development of miniaturized digital technologies converted in human prosthetics that transform men into a receptacle without mediations from all social, economic and cultural demands. Considering that the facilities conquered with the technological resources should subsidize individuals emancipation and free them from labor, the current paradox between continuous technological innovation and the frequent scarcity of tiMe under the entrepreneurShip neoliberal ideology iS queStioned.

Keywords : TIME; ACCELERATION; DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES; CONSUMERISM; DOMINATION.

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