Homo Cypiens. Herlander Elias
Читать онлайн книгу.
resemble to some kind of moving frontiers. As everything quickly changes we change by drag too. Change has become a dictatorship of the movement, an oppressive regime in which we are supposed to evolve, to move, mutate and migrate from one point to another. Our normal state is the transformation state, only that one when we stop for thinking is an extraordinary state. Normal, normal is to be set in motion, to be a mobile population using mobile media, such as PC tablets, smartphones and wearables. The whole world looks like a fitness competition: the human being is always at stake, always investing, always looking for something and learning, rarely based in the same place. We became totally "touristified" and became foreigners in our own country. The very notion of frontiers in motion also makes us question the concept of country. A country used to be a geopolitical territory with an army, aristocracy, people and natural resources. This was so in the old days. Now, a country has no defined legal borders other than technology. We reached a historical level where we can sell, give up its resources, the aristocracy can migrate and the people are the only constant in a world where frontiers have lost their traditional meaning.
The moving frontier is also the frontier of technology, digital and macro-medium. Now, everything is interconnected, machines and people, country with country, and media with media. The future belongs to the frontier that will continue moving, the one that does not stagnate and that is able to respond to the new challenges of mobile contemporaneity. This means that mobility has extinguished territories and countries, cities and languages. The machines of past centuries are not the determining machines of this twenty-first century. The twentieth century was devoured by world wars, expansion of cities and the tyranny of automobile and consumerism. The 21stcentury is a moving frontier, marked by sophisticated technology, mobile jobs, macro-media, youth entrepreneurship, renewable energy and light transport. Heavy machines dominated the 20thcentury which is opposite to light and environmentally friendly machines that dominate the 21stcentury.
If we reverse the question of the moving frontiers we have the movement of frontiers. This is where we also stand, in the condition of dealing with a changing reality, where we are forced to move, to run, to compete, to act, to seek and to undertake. One cannot at present stand still. The movement is a new "tyrannical" code that is made possible by the acceleration of the technique. The movement is us and the countries that deal with images of the future, narratives that give us glimpses of cities to build, magnificent places to build, products and vehicles that defy our imagination.
The moving frontier is something that has become the new normality. One does not intend to turn back because if we stop, others will not and then we are misled. The only response to the obstacles and walls is to open up even more lines of flows, after all the late and objectivist capitalism we know, once merged with digital media information, has become an unstoppable machine that aims to turn all sectors into financial markets. Capital is a flow machine. In fact, capital is the flow of flows because it relies on money, value and information, on goods and products, services and loans, investments and bonds. The flow of flows cannot have any obstacles to its passage. All the dynamic territory must be territory of capital, information, money. The whole moving frontier shows a boundary zone, an area in which the future is programmed, the future as an investment, but this time no longer as a political impetus but as a corporate goal. Today, the future lies in dynamic corporations. Franchise structures have replaced political systems, even governments are not able compete with board committees of large corporations, and countries' borders are in crisis while media and capital borders are in motion. Suddenly, from one moment to another, a person may become wealthy through a networked computer or may fall in poverty.
The new totalitarianism of information and capital alters the nature of the individual today. The new instruments are the flow of capital and viral information. The future belongs to those who manage to win in the economy of the immediate using these same weapons, to get successful and not to fall into oblivion. One of the negative sides of this new reality shows that it is much easier to fall into oblivion now than in the twentieth century, because there are more protagonists, celebrities, myths, narratives, brands and interests moving in this frontier of information and alluring capital.
10.The Perimeter of Ignorance
Never as now has so much information and knowledge been available, furthermore, and at the same time, the perimeter of ignorance has never been so great. It would be advisable to reduce the perimeter of ignorance, but unhappily it is not. Current generations dealing with mass media and digital media are not interested in learning, in the deep knowledge of things. They think that the information available in the media is forever guaranteed and that it can be found by a fingers clicking or touch. The problem is that the Net as we know it will end one day. More and more countries place restrictions on access to the Net, and with some countries controlling it only manipulated mass media are available.
The perimeter of ignorance should be short. At a time like ours, digital media corroborate an unparalleled presence in our lives as if we were just ignorant because we wish to be it. Everything is available. Everyone can access to. Only those who do not want to access to information, do not do it. But what it is the motive for which they do not? It is in this contradiction that our discussion is centered. What is happening now is a strange phenomenon: we have access to all kinds of information, everyone has access to the same information, but some of us choose not to do it.
Formerly, the perimeter of ignorance was wider. Many people could not study because families did not have money, global information was almost impossible to reach because we only mastered the mother tongue or because the educational institutions were geographically distant for us. What happens at the moment is more bizarre. There are more public and private educational institutions. There are more news agencies and Net and digital media are packed with sub-media, news aggregators and other means of information. In this way, those who are informed it is because they do want. The same is to say that if everyone has access to the same information, it fails to inform since the new "new" has ceased to exist. World news are spread on a large scale and leave out the volunteer ignorant. Beyond this kind of "ignorant" there is the non-synchronized ignorant. However, as a contradiction, in general there are more people accessing the media to find out what happens in the world.
It is true that there is a crisis in the world of information and it is also true that there is an excess of information, there is redundancy, moreover there is also a certain lack of originality in the content, not to mention how fake news (which no one confirms) circulate in digital media. The problem of information in the perimeter of ignorance is that it no longer contributes to the reduction of this perimeter and is currently causing it to increase. This means that the information is not informing, and the individuals who were once classic readers are no more interested in it. Today, no one reads the whole texts, instead they are read in a superficial way, and only a few lines are caught by the current reader's attention. There is not enough time to digest the huge amount of information and for deep thinking. We have opted to have more time to watch news videos than to read or write. The increase in the perimeter of ignorance has serious repercussions in the world of consumption, education and politics. Well-informed citizens make voluntary choices based on data; ignorant citizens choose products, narratives and political candidates emotionally. They are easy to handle. It seems that we have two opposing forces in confrontation. On one side, we have amateur and institutional news producers, and on the other, we find people interested in information becoming redundant and entropic, people who think that information is a utopia. What stands out in the present society is that nobody is, in fact, correctly and really informed.
For the younger the scenario is more sui generis. Young people accentuate the widening of the perimeter of ignorance or its shortening. There are young people disconnected from the real, living in their own world of social networks and video games, but there are also young people who do research and learn from other young people online. For the latter, the available resources of the network are still, for the time being, accessible true gold, since the fusion of capitalism and information complicates access to the media. At present the tendency is for all available content, from entertainment, information or knowledge to become paid services. And again this accentuates the widening of the perimeter of ignorance, since more people can be left out of the media access.
To be very explicit, an ignorant is not the same as