Ricerca di grande interesse, molto ben raccontata. Dedicata a Eugenio Scalfari e a tutti gli altri "sanno" (per rivelazione divina? per deduzione logica? per fede nelle verità auto-evidenti?) che la tecnologia ci rende necessariamente soli, anzi, asociali. E al diavolo la ricerca. juan carlos *T*echnology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All** By MARK OPPENHEIMERJAN*.* 17, 2014 In September 2008, two graduate students working for Keith Hampton, a professor at Rutgers, raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park, the sprawling green space behind the main branch of the New York Public Library*.* They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers*.* The charade didn't last*.* After an hour, Lauren Sessions Goulet, the more senior of the pair, found herself talking to the park's private security force, which sent her to see their bosses, the Bryant Park Corporation*.* She was nervous*.* Across the street and up 11 floors, in the corporation's Fifth Avenue office near the park, Goulet explained what Hampton had sent her there to do*.* "Look, we were just trying to refilm Whyte," she said, pleading with them*.* To her relief, the corporation offered to help. In the late 1960s and '70s, working with the New York City Planning Commission, the sociologist William H. Whyte conducted groundbreaking granular studies of the city's public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public*.* Where do they like to sit? Where do they like to stand*?* When they bump into people they know, how long do their conversations last*?* The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction*.* Whyte believed that if we knew how, say, the placement of benches, or a plaza's orientation to the sun, affected people's enjoyment of a public space, then we could go beyond mere observation into the realm of smarter policy*.* We could make people happier*.* [...] Continua qui: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/magazine/technology-is-not-driving-us-apar...