Increase the focus on culture

Italy? “A sleeping beauty resting on its vast artistic heritage and leaving it to rot without doing anything decisive”.

Derrick De Kerckhove, one of the most influential scholars of new media, looked upon as the heir to Marshall McLuhan, author of landmark publications such as Brainframes and Connected Intelligence, certainly cannot be accused of having contempt for Italy. For a number of years he has been living between Canada, France and Italy, first in Naples where he taught for a long time at the University Federico II and more recently in Rome. “In the field of technology and especially in the area that borders between art and technology there are a lot of interesting things going on but they are isolated from one other. There is a lack of an overall strategy”.

The opportunity for this disconcerting analysis was offered by a conference organised by the Mediateca Santa Teresa in Milan by Meet The Media Guru, “Focus: Innovation and Culture”, with Freddy Paul Grunert from ZKM in Karlsruhe, Alessandro Rubini from Fondazione Cariplo and Maria Grazia Mattei, promoter of the event – where De Kerckhove extended an invitation to “increase the focus on culture”, as the title of the event suggested.

“There are initiatives like MAV, Museo Archeologico Virtuale, at Herculaneum, that has been active for over ten years amid countless difficulties, along with brilliant individual ideas like that of the application Museum Bubble, conceived by the Carraro brothers that enables the iPad to be used like a kind of telescope that visualises three-dimensional spaces, a project mentioned by Steve Jobs in his presentation of the iPad2. You Italians have a high level of creativity but this encounters obstacles in the absence of a true system along with the substantial paralysis of administrational bodies”.

A possible way of improving the situation, according to the scholar, is to extensively rethink education. “We need an operation that I would define 'Jesuits 2.0', a re-founding of culture similar to that which gave rise to pedagogy started by Ignazio di Loyola that “formatted” the western mind based on writing and knowledge of the arts, including theatre. In that case it was well understood that with the spread of writing every aspect of education needed rethinking. We have to do the same with digital language, deepening knowledge of digital culture and instruments for putting it into practice right from school. All previous knowledge needs to be revised in the light of these innovations”.

We have to take on board that Brainframes, to use the term introduced by Derrick de Kerckhove himself, or rather the profound categories with which we interpret the world, are altered by digital technologies. The alphabetic brainframe, that dominated the scene for a long time, is being replaced by the digital one, where the body is in a direct relationship with images and space for mental elaboration is reduced. Continuing along this line the next step is the relationship with three-dimensionality. “We have to learn to think in 3D. It is an important cognitive evolution on a road that started in the 1950s. Nowadays the young live like this: inside and outside the screen. An interesting starting point could be the extended use of 3D printers that are becoming more and more affordable. 3D electronic culture radically changes our imagination: virtual reality functions because instead of being spectators we are participants. But we have to be ready for this stage”. Another aspect that should be part of this new educational architecture and that is particularly close to his heart is that of privacy and transparency.

“There exists a real ‘digital subconscious’, everything that the Internet knows about us and that is available to others without us knowing. A genuinely ethical approach is needed: we have to return to the concept of honour and reputation. I have the right to know about the profile my supermarket holds for me, or my telephone provider and all the other entities that I give my personal information to. To guarantee me this there should be a law, and before that we have to diffuse practices of using social media with greater awareness”. In short, according to the scholar, we need “an ethic of transparency in the age of Big Data”. Without over-estimating data however: it is true that we find all the answers in it but there is the risk that we end up like the man that McLuhan spoke of, warns De Kerckhove: “the 21st century man who runs down the street saying ‘I know all the answers!’ yes but what are the questions?”.

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