Alexa, was Don Quijote Mad? Enchanted Heads in Cervantes’s World and in Our Own

• Bryan Betancur ^[1]
  1. [1] City University of New York

     City University of New York

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, ISSN-e 0277-6995, Vol. 42, Nº. 2, 2022, págs. 33-56
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen
  • español

    Este ensayo propone una nueva lectura de la cabeza encantada en Don Quijote (2.62) a partir de recientes estudios del capitalismo de vigilancia. Se consideran dos preguntas centrales. En primer lugar, ¿qué nos revela la presencia de “cabezas habladoras” en nuestros hogares (dispositivos como Amazon Echo) sobre la difusión y el impacto de la vigilancia en la España del siglo XVII? Segundo, ¿qué nos enseña la falta de razonamiento crítico ante la cabeza encantada por parte de don Quijote sobre la facilidad con la que nuestra sociedad cede a las fuerzas políticas y comerciales que nos espían e intentan manipular nuestro comportamiento

  • English

    [...]like the hapless hidalgo, we accept our loss of privacy without giving thought to the extensive, troubling ramifications of mass monitoring. Under the promise of enhanced productivity and easier access to goods and services, products such as the Amazon Echo harness ever-greater amounts of personal information and convert it into caches of data sold to the highest bidder, all outside consumers' awareness (94). [...]if we consider surveillance fundamentally as the monitoring of a population with the goal of facilitating social intervention (Nájera 152), then the authority and reach of royal institutions such as the Inquisition would suggest the Spanish Crown attempted to keep watch over its subjects to influence their behavior without a sophisticated surveillance apparatus. Most cases that the Inquisition adjudicated were initiated on the basis of accusations made by private individuals, many of whom sought out the Holy Office not to protect religious orthodoxy but to settle personal grievances (Kamen 27). The Inquisition's reliance on denunciations and oral testimony from private parties reflects (and contributed to) what Marina Brownlee describes as the early modern period's "veritable cultural obsession" with gossip and private life (2-3), a social phenomenon that threatened to turn the home into an arena of surveillance