Report on the intervention of Carlo fomenting "Enchanted by the network. Imaginaries, utopias and conflicts in the age of the Internet".
Enchanted by techno enthusiasm?
The report by Carlo Formenti Enchanted by the net. Imaginaries, utopias and conflicts in the age of the Internet held on March 9, 2013 within the conference stori. History in the digital age was a sort of counterpoint to the speeches of other speakers who had analyzed the new media as neutral educational tools.
Formenti started from the following question: are new media really educational tools without any intrinsic connotation?
The answer is implicitly contained in the title of his report and is obviously negative. To focus on the problem, Formenti proposed a critical analysis of our relationship with new technologies, conducted by reconstructing the fundamental genealogical stages of the affirmation of the Web.
Three great founding myths have enchanted the great planetary public: the Internet and the new digital technologies would have been carriers of a process of democratization.
1. at the political level,
2. in economic terms,
3. in terms of the dissemination of knowledge.
Formenti's thesis is that all three of these founding myths of the Internet, subject to more careful analysis, are reduced to a mere ideological self-representation that the new media today offer of themselves. The step to take in order not to be enchanted by what the web would like to be told about her is to make a clear distinction between the current dimension of the Internet and those who are the real creators of the civil use of the Internet, that is, scholars from American universities, hackers and the first virtual communities in America, who operated inspired by the science fiction literature of Philippe K. Dick, from Norbert Wiener's theories and from the cyberpunk movements at the turn of the eighties and nineties.
The pioneers of the Internet certainly had as their main objective to create spaces of radical democracy and free movement of knowledge. But these instances of democratization ended up being devoured, paradoxically, when the new large groups of the computer industry began to take an interest in the Internet, that is, in 1995, when it was launched by Microsoft Internet Explorer; the birth of this browser constituted a point of no return in the process of monopolizing the flow of information.
The present reality of the Internet is well represented by some data: in fact, we know that 90% of blogs and posts on the Net are directly or indirectly controlled by the large groups of the cultural industry; we also know that a very significant part of financial transactions at world level no longer takes place on the stock exchanges of the big capitals, but in the so-called dark pools, the financial platforms external to the regulated circuits, where, that is, automated mechanisms play on minimal variations, even fractions, of the values of the securities and that, therefore, it is through the new digital technologies that the new forms of speculation of turbo-capitalism are developed.
Another process to which attention should be paid is that of clouds, huge tanks of private content, which are placed in the hands of corporations. Moreover, how can we pretend nothing in the face of the enormous amount of content and personal data that users make available on the Internet thanks, for example, to the use of social networks? The "Datagate" case, which is being discussed globally these days, is drawing global attention to the collaboration between state powers and corporations on the storage and control of content of millions of files, e-mails, etc. through the PRISM system and is bringing to light how the use of new technologies exposes citizens to the danger of being controlled - in spite of all respect for privacy - in an extremely intrusive way.
Proof of the processes of hybridization between strong powers (in itself uncontrollable by the laws of the market and competition) is the fact that the scandal "Datagate" involves the NSA along with the biggest names in the Net Economy.
The awareness of the fact that the Internet and, in general, all the new technologies cannot be considered "naturally" democratic, the awareness of the fact that these means of communication often work in one direction only (from top to bottom), and that the new forms of exploitation of workers and the new modes of control pass through the net are all essential questions for those who today intend to relate critically to the new technologies, also for educational purposes.