THE DIGITAL ERA

The last twenty years has been characterized by a rush in digitization.

The psychiatrist Vittorio Andreoli writes: “now we have the whole world in our pocket. In a few centimeters of plastic and microchip there are infinite possibilities for communicating, getting informed, having fun, concluding a deal and even falling in love. It is the mobile phone (or smartphone), symbol of the digital age, a tool that embodies and summarizes the all-human need to speak, listen, understand ”.

Technology has undoubtedly brought unimaginable advantages to the modern man. It shortened the space-time distances, giving immediacy to communication. However, there are some points of uncertainty in the idea of ​​technology, since the weaknesses and fragility of human nature remain. The more practical and faster life generated has discredited the concept of slowness, pushing people to run faster and faster, to the point of not even being able to stop and ask oneself questions. It should not be overlooked that there is a link between the concept of slowness and the space of reflection: "going slow - writes the sociologist Franco Cassano - is knowing how to fill the day with a sunset".

The fear is that the technology can empty the mind of men, artificially changing it in its structures and totally delegating the activity of processing to the digital device. The risk is that the "digital" human being could feel so comforted that he forgets to carry out the simple actions of everyday life, more and more abstracted from the true society; it is not rare, in fact, that one ends up within the four walls of a room, entering a sort of parallel life, easier and lighter, but which is part, as Andreoli writes, “of the logic of non-human living, regressing and moving on to the phase of our primitive ancestors. We will be technologized primitives but still primitives”. The founded fear is that this society will destroy itself getting locked in the most extreme individualism, in the narcissism, in the excessive exaltation of the Ego, with the consequent rupture of the social bonds. The man, taking as an example the "perfection" of the social world, will be led to wear millions of masks in order to create an ideal self, which does not correspond to the real one. We would then have a society dedicated to the useless, to the superfluous, to the representation of oneself more ostentatious and less alive.

                                                                                               
                                                                                                  Salvatore Cifalinò