“Smartphones are designed to be like videogames”, Alessandro Baricco in Conversations at La Pedrera

“Smartphones are designed to be like videogames, not to be or make us idiots, but instead because technology today is fun, intuitive, needs no instructions and offers scores and rewards. We are constantly shooting at Martians!” said the author Alessandro Baricco yesterday at his meeting with Elena Hevia, a cultural and literary journalist, during his participation in the Conversations at La Pedrera series. 

Yesterday, the Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation presented a new session of Conversations at La Pedrera which featured the renowned writer, journalist and novelist Alessandro Baricco, who was visiting Barcelona to launch his new book, ’The Game’. 

The Game
During the conversation, Baricco described his new book as an “archaeological thriller”, which “tells the story of a man who looks for stories, and finds them. It is the description of a journey... where the ruins of a civilisation are discovered.” ‘The Game’ seeks to understand the meaning behind everything. 

Ten years after ‘Los bárbaros’ (The Barbarians), in which Baricco reflected on the mutation - if not invasion - that our society was experiencing due to the impact of the new technologies, comes ‘The Game’, where the author traces the cartography of the digital insurrection. It is not merely a technological revolution but the collapse of the paradigms of 20th-century society. In just three decades, personal computers, smartphones and other devices (mere tools) have become indispensable and have especially changed the very substance of our conception of and our relationship with reality. And they have done so with a logic that was largely inherited from videogames: making everything easier (on the surface) yet with high technology (underneath). 

End of the eighth edition of the Conversations at La Pedrera series

Evolution, the digital revolution, the new generations and customs are just some of the topics discussed yesterday in the Auditorium of La Pedrera. This session marks the close of this season's series, which will be resumed after the summer with the participation of Colm Tóibín and Eva Illouz.

The Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation promotes cultural activities that foster the arts and thinking and seek to reflect to work for a fairer society. With Conversations at La Pedrera, the Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation seeks to stimulate critical thinking by giving a voice to world-class intellectuals from different fields of culture, society or science and sharing their career and vision of today's world.