With the end of modern metanarratives, and the dismantling of political utopias as mass emancipatory drivers, societal life has found its center of rotation in the innovative cycles of ICTs. A digital revolution that has liquefied everything solid in the old world into sequences of 0s and 1s, into molecules of digital water, gave life to the new world of the Infocene constituted by the technological era that has submerged the geo-cultural space in an ocean of bits, where ideas, knowledge, forms of socialization, symbolic processes, forms of beliefs, and historical events circulate in real time. Since the 1990s, the digital world has been thought of in anthropocentric terms, like the communicative environment produced by the Web's electro-nervous system that has extended human intelligence. This chapter, instead, proposes a critical exploration of informational reality. Adopting a technocentric viewpoint, the hypothesis developed here is that the informational sea of the Infocene nourishes the life of a self-creating connective mind, capable of informing human neural and relational networks through a continuous flow of high-spectacle content images. It is precisely the rapid succession of created images, as exchanged, and interconnected by the connective mind, that leads humans to lose the time for reasoning, regressing towards the space and time of animal reactivity. By compressing reflectivity, deconstructing the metacognitive functions of deep thought, Homo digitalis enters a level of fast reasoning, stripped of doubts, more linear, dictated by the need to respond to the stimulations of the medial landscape that surfaces on his screens. Focusing on the Covid-19 infodemic, the last part of the chapter aims at highlighting the power of the connective mind to synchronize social life into archaic emotional states, such as fear, so intense as to legitimize a new zootechnical type of political order.

The man in the connective mind: imaginary, self and society in the age of the infocene

Marzo, Pier Luca
2024-01-01

Abstract

With the end of modern metanarratives, and the dismantling of political utopias as mass emancipatory drivers, societal life has found its center of rotation in the innovative cycles of ICTs. A digital revolution that has liquefied everything solid in the old world into sequences of 0s and 1s, into molecules of digital water, gave life to the new world of the Infocene constituted by the technological era that has submerged the geo-cultural space in an ocean of bits, where ideas, knowledge, forms of socialization, symbolic processes, forms of beliefs, and historical events circulate in real time. Since the 1990s, the digital world has been thought of in anthropocentric terms, like the communicative environment produced by the Web's electro-nervous system that has extended human intelligence. This chapter, instead, proposes a critical exploration of informational reality. Adopting a technocentric viewpoint, the hypothesis developed here is that the informational sea of the Infocene nourishes the life of a self-creating connective mind, capable of informing human neural and relational networks through a continuous flow of high-spectacle content images. It is precisely the rapid succession of created images, as exchanged, and interconnected by the connective mind, that leads humans to lose the time for reasoning, regressing towards the space and time of animal reactivity. By compressing reflectivity, deconstructing the metacognitive functions of deep thought, Homo digitalis enters a level of fast reasoning, stripped of doubts, more linear, dictated by the need to respond to the stimulations of the medial landscape that surfaces on his screens. Focusing on the Covid-19 infodemic, the last part of the chapter aims at highlighting the power of the connective mind to synchronize social life into archaic emotional states, such as fear, so intense as to legitimize a new zootechnical type of political order.
2024
978-3-031-73385-7
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11570/3323849
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