Euforia digitale, società iperconnessa nei byte tesina

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

L’architettura

World Wide Web, afferma nel suo libro del nuovo Web di considerare

‘’un tutto potenzialmente collegato a tutto’’,

Internet come e in effetti ad oggi le opportunità

la rete sfiorano l’infinito: da qui l’euforia

che ci offre digitale con cui ho intitolato la mia

in posti lontani l’uno dall’altro

tesina. Nel web le distanze svaniscono, amici che abitano

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

‘’cercare di riempire un bicchiere sotto

Internet può essere paragonabile a le cascate del

Niagara’’ Basta un ‘’click’’ per avere il mondo nelle proprie mani: la

(Arthur Clarcke).

parte di 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

vita reale oggi, non è che

proposito sono emblematiche le parole di Giovanni Soriano:‘’La

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. The problem of abusing online chat is that actually we need reality to

learn how to live. In fact we use conversations with each other to learn how to have a

conversation with ourselves: so escaping from real conversations can compromise our

capacity of self-reflection, which is very important for kids to grow up.

Also the feeling that ''no one is listening to me'' has a central meaning in the comprehension

of our relationship with technology. In this sense Social media, such as Twitter and many

others, are like automatic listeners, always there to listen to you. Even if they do not really

care about what you say, they are always there for you. There will always be a place for

your thoughts and feelings on the

Internet. We just have to think about

what is written on the Home Page of

Facebook (''What's on your mind?'')

to understand how this process of

''technological-take-care-of-you''

works.

Your online access is the key to a

digital and social world full of

persons coming from different

countries who are as eager to be

heard as you are. Social media

create connections between people

all around the world, dissolving

distances. By the way, sometimes Social Media do create an ironic reality, because

simulating human relationships connects screens, not persons. As a result, it generates a new

kind of loneliness, more ambiguous and subtle than the usual loneliness.

7

In her book Alone Together-Why we expect more from

technology and less from each other, Sherry Turkle analyzes

how these little devices, which are our phones and tablets, are

so psychologically powerful to change what we do and

sometimes even who we are. We are letting technology take us

places we do not have to go- and be persons we do not have to

be. ‘’why

Thinking about the title of her book, do we expect more

from technology than from each other’’, according to Sherry,

technology attracts us because it covers our weaknesses.

Humans are social creatures, but at the same time they are

vulnerable, lonely and afraid of intimacy. So technology is

somehow the solution to our problems because it gives us the

illusion of friendship. It makes us feel connected in ways we

can comfortably control, giving us two apparent certainties: in the first place, that we will

always be heard. In the second place, that we will never have to be alone.

The latter idea is fundamental to understand some changes in our society. Nowadays being

alone is seen as a problem that has to be solved. Sometimes people solve it through

connection, which actually is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses an uneasiness,

but it does not solve it. In the twenty-first century

technology rules. More and more

people are constantly connected.

This perennial connection is

slowly reshaping ourselves in a

new way of being, which defines

our identity by sharing thoughts

and feelings, in the belief that ''I

share, therefore I am''.