Abstract
The unexpected proliferation of new electronic media in private homes under free market economies is taking place without regard for long term consumer interests.
The digital information revolution is presenting serious threats of information overload, cultural discontinuity, ‘commodification’ of knowledge, and colonisation of the intimate private life-worlds by impersonal and abstract systems. Further, it is mainly focused on a vertical axis of communication: information down to the consumers, money up to the commercial providers But multimedia technologies, presently being exploited in the service of one-way mass media and commercially-dominated interactive communication, may be considered alternatively as tools available for decentralised use in private homes and local neighbourhoods. It is suggested that concepts of private homes as self-referential systems — and the construction of virtual homes and virtual neighbourhoods — may point the way to establish a grounding in real homes’ and real neighbourhoods’ use of technologies otherwise conducive to a disembedding of persons from psychologically important local, biographical and cultural continuity.
An experimental multimedia-home at the University of Copenhagen was in function as an early total-environment prototype for research and development along these lines until 1998.
A new Experimental Home may be created as an element in the new KUA (Copenhagen University Amager) campus currently under construction
Chapter PDF
References
Bjerg, K. (1996) Home-oriented informatics, telematics & automation. In Kent, A and Williams, J.G.(eds) Encyclopaedia of Computer Science and Technology, vol 35. Marcel Dekker, N.Y.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity. Blackwell, Oxford.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behaviour. Oxford University Press
Miles, I. (1988) Home informatics: information technology and the transformation of everyday life. Pinter Publ., London.
Silverstone, R. et al (eds.) (1992) Consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces. Routledge, London.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bjerg, K. (2001). Towards the Virtual Home: Construing the Multimedia-Home to Enhance Cultural and Biographic Continuity. In: Rasmussen, L.B., Beardon, C., Munari, S. (eds) Computers and Networks in the Age of Globalization. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 57. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35400-2_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35400-2_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-4838-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-35400-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive