Euforia digitale, società iperconnessa nei byte tesina

Euforia digitale

Riflessioni e considerazioni sulla società iperconnessa nei byte

Giulia Di Fonzo

Liceo Classico-Linguistico “G. Carducci”

Anno scolastico 2014-2015

Indice 2

• Introduzione……………………………………….Pag. 3
• The Social Media………………………………..Pag.
• Connected, but alone?.........................................................Pag. 6
• Social Media e Social Network…………………………...Pag. 10
• L’identità ai tempi dei social………………………………..Pag. 12
• Disorientamento digitale……………………………………….Pag. 13
• Digital Personae……………………………………...Pag. 14
• Il Panottico virtuale………………………………Pag. 15
• La fine della privacy………………………………Pag. 17
• La scia dei “mi piace”………………………………Pag. 18
• Internet e l’economia del dono……………………...Pag. 19
• Conclusione……………………………………..Pag. 20
• Bibliografia e sitografia…………………………...Pag. 21

1

Introduzione

La tesina nasce come riflessione su uno degli aspetti a mio parere più rilevanti della società contemporanea: Internet e i Social Media, che ho analizzato soprattutto dal punto di vista umanistico e sociologico. Penso infatti che il web stia profondamente cambiando la nostra percezione del mondo e di una serie di valori e concetti come l’amicizia, l’amore, l’identità e la privacy.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventore assieme a Robert Cailliau del World Wide Web, afferma nel suo libro del nuovo Web di considerare “Internet come un tutto potenzialmente collegato a tutto”, e in effetti ad oggi le opportunità che la rete ci offre sfiorano l’infinito: da qui l’euforia digitale con cui ho intitolato la mia tesina.

Nel web le distanze svaniscono, amici che abitano in posti lontani l’uno dall’altro possono mantenere facilmente i contatti; si possono fare nuove amicizie con persone mai viste nel mondo reale, si può reperire una quantità di informazioni inimmaginabile, si viene aggiornati su cosa succede nel mondo quasi in tempo reale: tutto è immediato e semplice.

La mole di informazioni a cui si può attingere è immensa, tanto che fare una ricerca su Internet può essere paragonabile a “cercare di riempire un bicchiere sotto le cascate del Niagara” (Arthur Clarcke). Basta un “click” per avere il mondo nelle proprie mani: la parte difficile è sapersi orientare.

Il mondo virtuale oggi risulta spesso un modo per evadere dalla realtà, che a volte si rivela essere più scomoda, dura e difficile del previsto. Il Web in questo caso costituisce il rifugio perfetto in cui nascondersi. Sempre più persone trovano conforto online e preferiscono la realtà digitale a quella effettiva.

A questo proposito sono emblematiche le parole di Giovanni Soriano: “La vita reale oggi, non è che il rifugio di tutti coloro i quali sono incapaci di vivere virtualmente.”.

Le nuove tecnologie si sono insinuate gradualmente nelle nostre vite, tanto che adesso molti di noi non riescono più a farne a meno. Cellulari, computer, tablet: sono tutti dispositivi che ci mantengono connessi gli uni agli altri nella nostra Rete Sociale; andiamo a scoprire perché ne abbiamo così bisogno.

2

The Social Media

What is the meaning of “Social media”?

The term “Social media” stands for all those websites that allow users to create, share or exchange information, ideas, pictures or videos in virtual communities and networks.

Social media differs from traditional media -such as TV- because they allow users to be active participants of the community and fundamental contributors for the survival of the website interacting with each other.

On the other hand, traditional media offer a one-way communication system in which one authoritative source (like radio or newspaper) sends out news to people who simply receive and consume it.

Ephraim Julius Freed (digital workplace strategist) defines this difference as a “one-to-many” communication approach versus a “many-to-many” communication environment.

Some examples of Social Media

Facebook: with more than 1,4 billion users, Facebook (founded in 2004) is one of the most popular social networks. It allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and videos, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family members, colleagues etc.

Every day more than 12 billion messages are sent on Facebook.

3

Twitter: founded in 2006, it allows registered members to broadcast short posts called “tweets”, which must have a maximum length of 140 characters. Twitter members can share other tweets and follow other users. The most followed-on Twitter user is American pop singer Katy Perry, with more than 70 million followers.

Wikipedia: Wiki is an Hawaiian term which in English means “quick”. It is a free, online encyclopedia founded in 2001, created through the efforts of users known as “Wikipedians”. Anyone registered on the site can publish an article (while registration is not required to edit articles). Wikipedia has over 13 million articles in 250 different languages.

Unfortunately, more than 22% of the information available on Wikipedia has never been opened or read.

Youtube: founded in 2005, Youtube is a video-sharing website. Unregistered users can watch videos, whereas registered users can upload videos to their channels. Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world (after Google) with more than 120 million videos. To understand the popularity of this community it has to be said that every day about 200 million videos are watched.

And it would take over 600 years to see all videos available on Youtube.

4

Other successful social media

Google +: Google's social networking project, designed to replicate the way people interact in real life according to its slogan “Real-life sharing rethought for the web”.

LinkedIN: a social networking site designed specifically for the business community. 75% of companies in the United States use LinkedIN to find employees.

Pinterest: social website for sharing and categorizing images found online. It requires brief descriptions, but the main focus of the site is on images. Clicking on an image you will take to the original source (for example if you click on a picture of a pair of shoes, you might be taken to a site where you can buy them).

Very popular are also Instagram (300 million users), Tumblr (110 million users), VK (80 million users) and many others.

Moreover, on the Internet there are over 200 million Blogs (online diaries written by the so-called “Bloggers”, ordinary or famous people who write about their opinions and thoughts): 54% of bloggers post contents or tweets daily, and many of them (34%) say their opinion about products and brands: many people are deeply influenced by their tips.

80% of Twitter and Facebook usage is on mobile devices: it means that people update anywhere and anytime. Nowadays, social media are a widespread phenomenon which affects our society and partly our lives.

5

Connected, but alone?

Sherry Turkle and her considerations about technology at TED Talks 2012

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and sociologist who studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships, turning her attention to the world of social media.

She is also the founder and director of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Initiative on Technology and Self.

In March 2012 Sherry takes part in a TED conference (in Long Beach-California).

TED is a non-profit community which every year organizes many conferences all around the world about almost all topics- from science to business to global issue- in the form of short talks (about 20 minutes or less).

TED strongly believes in the power of ideas to change attitudes and lives, in order to create citizens of the world aware of the society where they live.

I am grateful to TED talks because it allowed me to broaden my perspectives, learning to discover new points of view. I watched for the first time Sherry Turkle's talk on the Internet last year, and I found it very interesting and enlightening.

It is, as Alex Rister (Communication specialist) said, a “wake-up call for communication”. It makes people conscious about the risks of taking refuge in the web.

We are drawn by social media to escape in phones, running away from real life. That is because we can no longer be alone. Every time we are alone, we need somehow to take the phone (to listen to music, go to Facebook, check messages or make a call etc.).

It happens in particular to digital natives, that is young people in the age of global communication. But actually there are more and more adults online (the fastest growing age group on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females).

People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere- connected to all different and virtual places they want to be. They desperately seek each other but at the same time they do not want to be too close: Sherry Turkle call this phenomenon the “Goldilocks effect”.

It means that the solution to find the right distance between each other has to be found on the Internet. Indeed, people want to customize and control their lives. In this way we are getting used to a new way of being alone together, always connected but even isolated.

6

In her talk Sherry speaks about the differences between online and real conversation. When you have a real conversation you cannot control what you are going to say, and all the things that you are saying are accompanied by your body language. Many times our facial expression confirms or denies what we are saying, betraying the truth that we are hiding.

We used to say “the eyes are the mirror of the soul”, so what is going on if we completely neglect body language and face-to-face talk in favor of a more calculated online and virtual conversation?

Texting, email, posting and all of these things let us present the self as we want it to be. Human relationships are richer than any other but they are even messy, strange and difficult to understand.

That is the reason why sometimes we clean them up with technology: it happens, as Sherry Turkle said, when we “sacrifice conversation for mere connection”, short-changing ourselves.