Every day millions of images are being rapidly produced and consumed. Without being aware of it, we are undergoing a huge change in language and speed. Not only that. The attention we give to the computer screen is radically transforming our concepts of friendship, connection, care and intimacy.
A self-published book by an Italian outsider explores the dark aspects of social networks, drawing the attention of media theorists and philosophers.
The Digitally Divided Self has just been released on Amazon and other online and traditional channels. Michael Wesch, Associate Professor of Digital Ethnography, said, “No other book to date brings together the multitude of issues related to how the seductions of technology impinge upon and affect the development of the self and soul.” Also, The Digitally Divided Self received praise from Eric and Michael McLuhan, Ervin Laszlo, and Howard Rheingold, as well as many other media theorists and philosophers.
Curious to know more, I interviewed the author, Ivo Quartiroli.
- In your book, you write about “the digitization of reality”. What exactly do you mean?
The digitization of reality is the phenomenon whereby all of reality becomes translated and sucked into the digital realm.
Most human activities have already been digitized: many jobs including artistic ones, entertainment, finance, and marketing, as well as the inner needs such as connecting with people, a sense of community, dating, and sexual arousal, have digital counterparts.
More often than not, those digital counterparts, rather than complementing real-life events, replace them altogether.
The digitization of reality, in few words, is the belief that comes from philosophical as well as religious factors that we can reproduce, control, program and “enhance” reality through digital technologies.
- The Digitally Divided Self also explores the dark aspects of social networks. Which are, in your opinion, the most underestimated aspects among the general public?
Usually, people are much concerned about privacy issues. While those are legitimate aspects of worry about social media, even more worrying are the inner transformations that take place by relating to people through social networks. Whatever our cultural background and our communication attitude, we restrict the great variety of human connection to clicks, uploads, and mostly short comments. No voice, no body language, no pheromones, no subtle aspects. The exchange and sharing happens just on the mental level, where there’s space for projections, illusions, and where we lose the wider possibilities of being human. What’s more disturbing than privacy issues is the transformation of the concepts of friendship, connection, care, intimacy.
We tend to digitize even our most cherished relationships, reducing them to bytes represented by small pictures and words scrolling through the screen. We become bulimic for novelties. And the game can go on only if we feed the internet in order for our minds to be fed.
- Why does the attention we give to the computer screen transform us radically without us being aware of it?
Because the computer is the natural outcome of human development up to this point. For the human mind, it is natural to be caught in an endless information loop. Beginning from our neurophysiology itself, we are wired in a way that we can’t help but follow any novel stimulation. This mechanism has ancient roots, which reward us with a pleasurable dopamine shot whenever we attended to external stimuli, giving better chances of survival against predators.
- I am not sure I can follow you… where is the link between the computer and the dopamine shot?
The computer leveraged on this ancient conditioning while adding a number of irresistible features for our psyche, “fulfilling” our needs for self-expression, communication, community, dating, and work. However, those needs are being taken care of only at the mental level, the level that the collective evolution is on in this historical stage.
The information society feeds the mind more than any other epoch. But what we don’t realize is that we are not just the mind and that the mind, though an important stage in human development, is far from being the final blossoming. Emphasizing exclusively the mental level makes us both withdraw from the connection with our bodies and from a higher awareness beyond the mind. The very idea of something “beyond the mind” is unknown to most people but the ones who are on a spiritual path. Meditation and an observing attitude can contact an awareness that can look at, understand, and use the mind, but from a broader point of view, which includes the mind also.
- In your book, you mention the fact that the Internet switched language progressively from texts to images. The fruition of photographs became very fast; millions of images are being rapidly produced and consumed. In your opinion, which are the effects of this change in language and speed?
In my opinion, a word is worth one thousand images. Images are being translated into an inner semantic, which ultimately translates into concepts and words. Images, differently from words, and especially moving images (TV, YouTube, and videos in general), pour on us without much effort on our side and without much awareness involved. Images are less interactive because they don’t interact with our inner feedback as a written text does. The fast fruition of photographs, especially when disconnected from a narrative, is one of the ways the mind hungry for novelties gets involved with external inputs in order to avoid turning the attention to the inside.
- Where will this bring us? Can you venture a forecast about the possible future outcomes of the information society?
I prefer to observe the present, but I can tell one of my bets for the future. The information society will be a very short stage in human history, much shorter than the industrial age. The information society is not sustainable in terms of the raw materials and the energy needed to produce evermore powerful equipment and gadgets, as well as in terms of the toll that information takes on our minds.
- And after the information society?
All outcomes are possible, from an evolution of what Peter Russell defines as “consciousness processing” to an involution of humanity where many factors will collapse toward a chaotic stage, combining environmental, economic, and peak resources crises.
On a more short-term market level, we will see even more volatility in the rise and fall of Internet companies and sites. What the mind creates, the mind, after a while, destroys. Every mental creation is ephemeral in itself, and software is the apotheosis of mind creations.
