"To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"
In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte published the best seller "Being Digital": Internet started to spread in the US and in a few years, the Network will become the main media in contemporary society. Digital literacy becomes as important as the traditional one for the cognitive development of individuals and communities. Already a few years before everything is fully revealed, Negroponte in his book sees the enormous potential of digitization, the translation of all types of communication, written, verbal, graphic or video, in a sequence of bits, zero and one. Today you can transfer in digital format also scents remotely. 3D printers allow you to create objects starting from their digital "footprint". You can digitize everything, turn it into a sequence of zeros and ones, in bits, in numbers. In the late '60s McLuhan writes "The medium is the message" to emphasize that it is the medium used to communicate even more content to influence the mindset of an entire society. So according to McLuhan the Internet, email, social networks, are changing the way we think and not just to communicate, to understand things and relate with what surrounds us ... or maybe it's the opposite: it is the way we think that determines the success of a media over another, so maybe the web is the result of our way of interpreting the world, things, people.
Everything is digital. Everything can be represented by a number. Almost a century ago Weber had called it "Entzauberung der Welt", the disenchantment of the world: "Hence,
it
means
that
principally
there
are
no
mysterious
incalculable
forces
that
come
into
play,
but
rather
that
one
can,
in
principle,
master
all
things
by
calculation.
This
means
that
the
world
is
disenchanted". The secularization of Western society has for decades been the main driver of the power of the developed countries on the rest of the planet. Probably now this same secularization is becoming the main weakness of contemporary society. The post-modern man has become a "tired" teenager, guided by the instincts of a young boy without his desire to discover and reinvent the world. In his "The McDonaldization of Society" Ritzer represents the general trend of contemporary society to make everything measurable, calculable and predictable as in the big chains of fast food or the entertainment parks Disney like. So humanity could transform his real identity in a purely digital, virtual, quantitative, measurable identity. The person now takes a "use value" as any kind of goods. Reduced to a commodity loses its humanity, becomes the object and not the subject of History.
The digital being increasingly connected manifests itself in the communication based on shared bit alphabet but manipulates it in order to build an infinite number of different languages that often makes impossible the reciprocal understanding and the ability to find shared ideals and shared ethical. A distorted individualism that does not value the human being but fragments and confuses him in a variety of senses without sense, meaning not shared, and so without any utility in order to build communities. The disputes increase and become more rare the agreement points. The development of the society seems to be driven by the interest of few people in the inability of most ones to unite their efforts to combat the trend towards the commodification and profit maximization. People become things and the rights of people seem to become obstacles to pursuing the only valued objective, the economic-financial wealth. When will the stock market listing the well-being? Can this one be associated only to a cold and detached economic value? Corn, rice, flour, water are not considered essential goods, on which depends the survival of a large part of the world population, but numbers that have a value and things on which to speculate. The workers are not people, but the gears of a production system able to create value and rights become only imperfections within financial processes only apparently well-oiled. It is not a problem only of democracy, but of survival. Man survives only as a collective, community, society. The good of few people against the good of many people inevitably leads to self-destruction.
"To be, or not to be, ... Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer .... Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, ... And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action".
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"
In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte published the best seller "Being Digital": Internet started to spread in the US and in a few years, the Network will become the main media in contemporary society. Digital literacy becomes as important as the traditional one for the cognitive development of individuals and communities. Already a few years before everything is fully revealed, Negroponte in his book sees the enormous potential of digitization, the translation of all types of communication, written, verbal, graphic or video, in a sequence of bits, zero and one. Today you can transfer in digital format also scents remotely. 3D printers allow you to create objects starting from their digital "footprint". You can digitize everything, turn it into a sequence of zeros and ones, in bits, in numbers. In the late '60s McLuhan writes "The medium is the message" to emphasize that it is the medium used to communicate even more content to influence the mindset of an entire society. So according to McLuhan the Internet, email, social networks, are changing the way we think and not just to communicate, to understand things and relate with what surrounds us ... or maybe it's the opposite: it is the way we think that determines the success of a media over another, so maybe the web is the result of our way of interpreting the world, things, people.
"To be, or not to be, ... Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer .... Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, ... And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action".
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