Persona-lização: personas e experiências tecno-imaginativas contemporâneas

Abstract

The experiences that we live using our smartphones point to new ways of relating with the world, relationships mediated by technique, by images, and permeated by subjectivity. In each access to the Apps installed in our phones we act as users, interacting with systems, accepting logics, and actively participating in the processes that make possible all experiences in these environments. By registering and configurating our data and permissions, we make ourselves available to a large array of connections. We act with gestures in the media platforms, leaving traces, allowing calculations which, in turn, conduce and motivate us to experience environments ruled by market logic. We live surrounded by products developed by designers, environments designed to keep us, the users, involved in a process of feedback and digital learning. Confronted with this scenario, this thesis observes the resulting images in our smartphones with the objective of understanding how the techno-imaginative processes, enabled by digital logic, act in the sense of allowing to see images of persona-lization. Here we use the term persona-lization for the imagetic techno-cultural phenomenon that allows to see personas. Our objective is to analyze the process of persona-lization to dis-cover aspects that both allow and potentialize such contemporaneous imagetic digital phenomenon. While we use the phone Apps to carry out our daily tasks and expose our subjectivity through performances, we are exposed to images that are exclusive, ephemeral, fluid, and complex. The observation of these superficial images leads us to the recognition of the intuitive method in a process to grasp the object in itself, in the essence of what it encapsulates. Using cartography we go through the images attentively, recognizing clues and remnants that then, through the evidential paradigm, we are able to dis-cover, infer and imagine the processes covered in this study. To contemplate the complexities of this perspective, we have several concepts here synthesized by the terms image, software, algorithm, smartphone, interface, persona, design, and user. The themes explored here condense these theoretical perspectives throughout the thesis to observe and comprehend the persona-lization phenomenon in all its complexity and extent, to finally apprehend it in the specificities of this study.