Modern digital technologies are having a widespread impact on our perception of the worldMany of our daily experiences are anticipated and mediated by a large number of multimedia devices. Thus, reality is continuously read, or rather re-read, through digital and media logic. In this way, new modes of communication not only determine our expectations and condition our reactions to reality, but create a veritable hyperrealityThe latter, as described by the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, it is like a veil that permeates reality, which ends up losing value, suffocated by digital perfectionHyperreality defines models that exist only in virtual spaces, existing only as simulations. Thus, the society of images finds in the digital and multimedia world a sort of hyperuranion, a safe, virtual place, where it generates an alternative reality detached from human experience, no longer referring to it.
Google Maps, Instagram & Co.
Digital platforms such as Google Maps o Instagram They influence our perception of a city, an event, or simply an image. Google Maps defines our itineraries, displays photos, and offers suggestions on what to see within a city. It creates expectations, creates models, preceding realityIt presents photos and information about monuments, squares, works of art, meeting places, anticipating our perceptions, very often creating contradictory feelings and reactions. Instagram, after all, with its filters and its followers, represents one of the greatest expressions of hyperreality, as a perfect realization of the image societyIt's no coincidence that this is the most popular social network today. Most of the images that pass through this social network are filtered and modified, sometimes clearly, sometimes imperceptibly. This, however, doesn't prevent followers and the digital public from celebrating, with showers of likes and comments, an image that is essentially false, unreal, but precisely for this reason more fascinating than a reality now deprived of any interestThe examples could continue, a long list where we could find other digital products such as video games or apps for augmented realityHyperreality, as an alternative and predominant reality, is increasingly finding digital expressions, increasingly more ways to make all the most human characteristics of reality obsolete.
The direction of the code
Digital technology, code, inevitably represents our future. Its rise thanks to multimedia tools—like the smartphone —and its increasingly pervasive presence in our daily lives have simplified our lives, our work, and our communications. Code will become the director of our thoughts, our reactions, our possibilities, through the constant remediation and codification of events, information, and more generally, the entire human experience. Perhaps, in a not-so-distant future, to paraphrase Baudrillard himself, "there will no longer be fiction or reality; hyperreality will abolish both ." If so, in a world where code becomes even more pervasive and evocative, humanity will always be able to rely on the two tools that have made us free, both in the most illustrious and the darkest historical periods: doubt and awareness.
Doubts and awareness
Il doubt It is a manifestation of personality, of presence, which can stimulate reflection in others but also allow one to develop one's own position regarding all the technological products of the digital age. Essentially, methodical doubt is what is needed to avoid further fueling the passivity, fascination, and dependence that new technologies are capable of inducing in humanity. Questioning new media and their remediations, the society of images, is a necessary action to restore reality and nature to a relevant place on the stage of human experience. awareness It's often a consequence of doubt, but it's also a state, an attitude, in which we can detect and determine the direction of the code, thus reducing its invasiveness. Cultivating awareness means constantly being curious and acquiring information from diverse sources, without depending on any one of them. The pursuit of awareness leads us not to settle for headlines, hashtags, or likes; it leads us not to accept reality as it appears, and therefore requires effort, a proactive approach to what isn't evident, to a truth that isn't given, not digital, but our own.
Francesco Plaino
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