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the applications of social media. Social networks are the new cathedrals and TV screens. That's why people are so easily surveilled. The very people, as Bauman well points out in his text on “liquid modernity”, confess their whole life online. Intriguingly, people tell all about themselves on social networks, which Bauman had already identified as the “default address” for these new generations. Note that we are all (since Samsung promoted the self-photographing format in selfies at the Hollywood Oscars delivery ceremony) to self-photograph ourselves, fulfilling Orwell's fears; it is ourselves that we are watching and making ourselves public through smartphones that are basically cameras to shoot and take photos disguised as mobile phones. We opened, not the “pandora box”, but instead the “pandora camera”. Since everything we share gets registered on the magnanimous servers of the cloud, we happen to be on the wrong side of the equation at this stage of surveillance capitalism. Now we only have the terminals. The true apparatus lies in a safe and remote place. Everything is safe. We're online, and that's what most audiences / users seem to be interested in. Once in this state, what happens is that whenever we shoot or take photos we are opening ourselves to the world. Each smartphone user is his or her own Foucault, Orwell and Warhol. We are always in direct digital media. And even if we can leave, we're online through wireless connections.
Nikola Tesla's dream about the electric car is now consumed in the present. But the most pressing thing is that we have wireless communication links. This capitalism monitors us through the air, crosses walls, crosses borders and globalizes brands and institutions with a very peculiar signature. We're just in the middle. So, there is only medium, media, digital media, and it is called “media-environment” in contrast to the first environment we left behind in the original, remote and beautiful African savannas. Interestingly, Marshall McLuhan, in the 1960s, spoke about computer expansion and the so-called “electric environment”. If we add to this Manuel Castells’ idea that the “information society” had merged with capitalism, we can infer that the new capitalism of surveillance is a byproduct of the fusion between technology, media and capital. The “pandora camera” was opened, and now no one is safe because images and financial history produce our new I, an I star, capitalizable and digitized forever and ever.
9. The Literacy (And The) Visual
In the modern age, massive dynamics work for and against us as well. In the first place we are being offered with abysmal torrents of data and images, and secondly we can not forget that we are increasingly lost individuals in the vortex of information that surrounds us. In order to understand what is going on, it is necessary to dominate the fringes of information urgently. The images are extensions of discursive and / or narrative devices, and the latter of images. We should have good literacy, and in particular a cultured visual literacy with referential, just as it also seems that media literacy is welcome. It is often said that the future is a book to be written, but the idea that we can retain here is that whatever the future may be, it will certainly be technical, social, mediatic and full of images associated with narratives and narrative devices. Increasingly, narratives and images that appeal to our senses and attention are consumed. We are in an age where writers, reporters and artists, designers and moviegoers meet halfway with technologists to gain access to digital everywhere. The society can not be left without narratives or images of consumption, and in the present time the homo cypiensdeal daily with the massive dynamics because they were conditioned, driven to this situation. It was not an option.
The literate, in general terms, is a rare species. It symbolizes the theorist who contemplates the object, whence the greek word theorein; he is no longer the only figure who is able to explain to us what is happening. We need literacy, that is right, but there is all an engineering done by the media environment author that surrounds us. In this social and technical scope the narratives and images proliferate. We allow the theorist to be seen as a source of unnecessary knowledge in a more pragmatized world, when in fact it is the theoretical knowledge that offers us further explanation of how the world works. The universe of things that surrounds us is broad, vast, complex and liquid, difficult to understand without literacy. The literate and the technologist, the theoretician and the engineer are the heroes of contemporaneity, because they are in an advantageous position to look at the real with “seeing” eyes and hands to create. From their knowledge, magnificent theoretical structures and made of engineering, super-systems and platforms can exist. In our time, seeing is equal to knowing, and knowing how to do is equivalent to the other half of necessary knowledge. The twentieth century has left us many lies, fantasies and mythomanias. In the 21st century, what is lacking is people who, instead of imagining or fantasizing, are capable of creating something noble like the ambitious words of the great theorists. Since the great narrative has failed because it has become a historical straitjacket, what we have before us is an open space for the insertion of narratives and images at full speed, since the public do not have enough time to confirm most of the information with which they are bombarded.
It has become impossible to keep up with our real world. There is no possible literacy for a universe in which Artificial Intelligence creates solutions to all our new problems. Everything that is proposed to us is something designed to be decoded without difficulty. And in this context, what emerges and which requires more effort on our part is something of the theoretical kind, useless, as the laypeople understand about these technological matters. The theory, in turn, is the only way in which the ramifications of the system can be seen from above. If for the theorist the future is the book to write, for the engineer the future is what can be constructed according to the “right” techniques. The illiterate of the future will not be the one who can not read handwriting, but the one who can not read images. The metacoding of the images will require constructive literacy, as a subspecies of communication engineering between an increasingly binary, more basic, simple and immediate culture that contrasts with the broader, ambitious and hyper-referenced theoretical culture.
In the universe of the visually literate, all media proposals look like live pictures, interesting interaction zones, icons of the massive dynamics that dazzle us with their packages of options and images of seductive men and women: products, lifestyles, travel and several applications are shown to us in a non-stop pace. We live in a world designed to be decoded by us, and the more access we get to information, the more we are aware that what we know is a drop of water and what we do not know are oceans. We need to understand and participate more in the building up of the new reality instead of whining about the current dysfunctional state of things.
10. Participatory Workshops
We need “workshops” in which we can all participate. This might be a social media promise, but social networks are more interested in collecting users’ data for marketing and / or advertising purposes. What we have before us is a world of massive dynamics filled to the top with contradictions. Individualism proliferates and collectivism as well. We feel bad alone and poorly accompanied, when we should feel well alone and even better in social mode. We deal with excesses of various kinds, we can not digest everything and an almost military discipline is required to be able to unravel any subject. Massive dynamics ask us to participate, but it immerses us in many solutions, applications, ideas and products, trends and novelties. We really need to get involved in more initiatives. In today's hyper-complex world we survive only if we are working in groups and with predefined objectives. There are times when we make history, there are times when history makes us. We must be aware that the universe of massive dynamics is a demanding universe and that makes any university educational training useless if there is not a constant updating. The world spins and asks us to spin with it. You can not be out or lose the technological “train”. It's like a high-tech and non-stop imperative.
One of the strengths of social media should certainly be the creation of participatory workshops where people can get to know each other, and socialize with shared goals within a particular calendar of events. Instead, we become sombies, a kind of “undead of social networks”, and every web site or app we use in social media only forces us to look at more torrents of useless data that in little or nothing exalt us or push us for a better future. Social media silos is what actually defines these “social networking places” where we are often, where we spend time, but where nothing really matters to dazzle the theorist, the artist, the designer or the engineer.
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