What Should We Be Worried About?

THE CULTURAL AND COGNITIVE CONSEQUENCES OF ELECTRONICS

LUCA DE BIASE

President, Fondazione Ahref; scientific director, Digital Accademia; visiting lecturer in new media & journalism, IULM University, Milan

Sixty years ago, the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote about the cultural future of electronics. As a young poet before World War I, Ungaretti had been briefly fascinated by the Futurist movement, and he had strong feelings about the “poetic” rhythm of mechanics and the aesthetics in the technical discoveries. But after World War II, at the age of sixty-five, he was worried. In the past, he wrote, technology followed human imagination, but in the future the enormous set of engineering achievements, led by electronics, was going to go faster than human imagination; thus humanity could end up thinking as machines, losing the ability to feel, love, fear.

Lately, many scholars have been giving more than a thought to these matters. It has been a generative debate, touching on everything from the way search engines change our memorization strategies to the persuasive effects of interface design and even to the way some open platforms enhance our tendency to cooperate instead of compete. But after all that thinking, we are paradoxically both bored and worried. Innovation in digital technologies moves at such a fast pace that we still need more research about the cultural and cognitive consequences of electronics. For this research to succeed, it must be focused on long-term changes, which means defining the problem in a more holistic and less deterministic way, as Ungaretti suggested.

How can we think about the way we think, without letting our minds be trapped in the means we use to communicate? The mediasphere is a sort of environment, in which most information and knowledge live and develop. And the “information ecosystem” is a generative metaphor to make sense of such a media environment. This metaphor helps mediologists understand the coevolution of ideas and platforms. It works if one wants to stress the importance of diversity in the mediasphere. And it leads to approaching the media as a complex system.

But as the information-ecosystem metaphor grows more popular, it also generates a set of inconvenient analogies. Thus we start to look for an “ecology of information,” and we worry about long-term tendencies. This leads us to define specific problems about the risks of monocultures, the possible development of info-polluting agents, the existence of unsustainable media practices. This approach can be useful if we don’t let ourselves misinterpret the metaphor. Science, economics, politics, entertainment, and even social relations grow in the mediasphere. And ideologies, misinformation, and superstition also develop in the information ecosystem. We cannot think of info-pollution in terms of “bad content,” because nobody can define it as such, just as nobody can define as “bad” any life-form in an ecosystem. Info-pollution is not about the content; it is more about the process. It is about the preservation of a cultural equilibrium.

What exactly are we looking for, then?

We are looking for ways to let our imagination be free, to breathe new ideas, to think in a way not explained only by the logic and incentives of the mediasphere. How can this be done? Poetry is a kind of research that can help. Digital humanities are a path to enhance our ability to think differently. We need to develop an epistemology of information.

Knowledge is meant to set us free, provided that we preserve our ability to decide what is important, independent of what is defined as important by the platform we use. Freedom of expression is not only the quantity of different ideas that circulate (the wealth of which has never been as rich as it is today). Freedom of expression is also about the decision making that lets us choose ideas that are better than others, to improve our ability to live together.

We should be worried about how we go about finding the wisdom to allow us to navigate developments, as we begin to improve our ability to cheaply print human tissue, grow synthetic brains, have robots take care of our aging parents, let the Internet educate our children. Ungaretti would have thought, maybe, that what is required is only a digitally aware name for ethics, aesthetics, and poetry.