The Architecture of Seduction: An Analysis on Digital Architectures within Consumer Society

Currently new digital tools used in architecture are often at the service of a conception of architecture as a consumer society’s cultural good. Within this neoliberal cultural frame, architects’ social function is no longer seen as the production of urban facts with sense of duty, but as a part within the symbolic logic that rules the social production of cultural values as it was defined by Veblen and developed by Baudrillard. As a result, the potential given by the new digital tools used in representation has shifted from an instrument used to verify a built project to two different main models: At the one hand the development of pure virtual architectures that are exclusively configured within their symbolic value as artistic “images” easily reproducible. On the other hand the development of all those projects which -even maintaining their attention to architecture as a built fact- base their symbolic value on the author’s image and on virtual aesthetics and logics that prevail over architecture’s materiality. Architects’ sense of duty has definitely reached a turning point.

The consumer before the infoxication in the press discourse

In the media current context, the user is exposed every day to an informative saturation without precedents. The variety of the media by means of that it receives information, together with the revolution to all the levels that has supposed the Internet integration, it does that the consumer is bombarded literally by multitude of messages. But this bombardment does not imply an informative quality, but it can suppose an imbalance between the number of information and the quality of the same ones, avoiding so the user know the reality with veracity and depth. This article analyzes exhaustively the phenomenon of this overexposure named infoxication, the true dangers that it encloses, the possible solutions and how it affects the user and the Journalism in the production of written and audiovisual products through different mass media.