Info-Aesthetics: Representing Information Society

summary (6/00):

If novel and cinema were the new cultural forms reflecting the new industrial society, what are the new cultural forms, which would be able to adequately represent the new global information society? Given that computer is the engine of this society, we may expect that these forms would be computer-based (i.e., they would be "new media"). But how exactly they would reflect the specefity of the social and the human  experience of living in this new society which appears to resist easy visualization? (For instance, all kinds of work are reduced to sitting in front of a computer screen; all kind of activities are reduced to invisible streams of data travelling through the global computer networks.)  A related question is what kind of aesthetics is appropriate for a society where most work and many forms of leisure are computer-based? If industrial society led to a range of different aesthetics strategies, from montage to streamlined, ornament-free architecture and design, what are the new aesthetics appropriate for information society?