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Il Centro Linguistico I seminari COMUNITA' VIRTUALI IS THE MACHINE COMMUNIST? IMAGES OF TECHNOLOGY FROM HEIDEGGER TO CYBERPUNK. Michela NACCI In 1933, Lewis Mumford asked, "Is the Machine Communist?" This could be taken in two ways. I will deal with two: 1. technology tends to make whoever is working work with it; 2. the social effect of technology is collectivization, ?trouping people together/gathering in crowds, standardized masses. My paper will look at these two ideas, which have been taken up by several great authors on technology in the twentieth century: from Dewey to Jünger, from Heidegger to Spengler, from Arendt to Jonas, up to the collective intelligence of Pierre Lévy. The intellectual world has reflected on what is effectively an ambiguity of technology, and has ?made it operate between individuals and the masses, between communities and collectivism. This ambiguity is also present in the communities in which new forms of communications technology are coming out. I would like to analyze this two-sided, opposite point of view: the community (whether virtual or not) and the disappearance of the individual (global village, indiscriminate passivity, etc.). This second effect - the disappearance of the individual - is evaluated both in a positive and negative sense in recent analyses. ??What I would like to stress is that this ambiguity, this oscillation, are traits and interpretations which have gone together with the ?life of technology for at least a century. Torna al programma