Читать книгу Homo Cypiens - Herlander Elias - Страница 23

Knowing that we have to face the difficulties of an economy of the immediate, it is natural we feel confronted with other questions, such as understanding the various senses dispersed by all the media we use. The constellations of meaning are increasing. There is no longer a one-way narrative and the full explanation of the reality that affects us. There have been constellations of meaning that seek to function as explanatory fringes, in which each individual has the freedom and the chance to choose and believe what he or she understands. There is no longer a single narrative of meaning. The senses are now multiple. Poly-semantics has become a problem because as there is no sense of uniformity individuals no longer have in common the meaning of things they consume, read and study. Hence, communication becomes more chaotic, because not only are there more actors in the economy of the immediate, but the senses also have multiplied in such a way that there is not only one way of seeing the world. There are thus many worldviews. For the individual is left over choosing the constellation of meaning that his tribe understands to be the most consensual. Now an individual is a legion, but the senses and meanings are lost in the economy of immediacy. We no longer have time to understand ourselves as well as the social and technical world around us.

Another thing that we find worrying is the fact that we deal with increasingly heterogeneous universes, considering the fall of the great narrative in postmodernity, which functioned as a historical straitjacket. In the present times what we have before us is simply a puzzle. The world is sick, chaotic, complex, and over-accelerated to solve problems. There is a "touristification" of reality. We became tourists in our native environment. Now we can photograph the reality with smartphones, but we cannot think the real; we can have many friends on social networks, but just a few out in the real world. Currently, the dilemma that affects us is that we are proposed to be only observers, little or no critic, and there is no time to carefully observe what surrounds us, because we have only a little "immediate" time to buy a new object, something similar to the experience of the tourists when they visit a foreign country. At a glance everything becomes a souvenir of a reality that never existed. We are more communicative, but we are more isolated; we have more credit cards, but we are poorer; we have more friends on social networks, but we feel alone. Today the subject’s condition is that of the stranger. There is no existential meaning in the present reality because this is not assertive and uniform. In this way, and before the various constellations of meaning, we are in a situation of disconnection from the environment that surrounds us. We are tourists and foreigners, alienated and observant, we are everything but actors. We are not actors. We are players of a game that is already undermined.

It is increasingly difficult to understand reality. On the one hand, individuals do not cooperate, and when we say this it means they do not cooperate in the broad and human sense of the concept of "cooperation", since it seems that this pragmatic concept, both experiential and cultural, no longer makes sense. At the present time, anyone is potentially an adversary. All good-sounding speeches seem to us transcriptions of philosophical and corporate discourses. We are far from genuine messages. The reality with which we deal with is not the same one that is shown to us via media because it lacks meaning, it lacks mediation. It is necessary to reconnect everything, which, moreover, was a task of religions, to religareman to the divine. But the modern world has become too artificial and there is no desire to reconnect the individual, even with consumption. Indeed we are free to consume. We can talk about everything, but no one listens to us. We are more trapped, poorer, less intelligent, and less agile than the machines we invented. There is a lack of meaning in our minds and in the communities we know. At this moment, the main purpose of those who have the power is to "turistify" everything. The anthropological sites are disappearing to give way to a collection of infrastructures that look more like a shopping center. So, facing this artificiality that vampirically consumes the human being, what we need is connections and more humanism through a technology that enhances what is best in each person, and not one that enslaves us.

In the present time, the individual suffers alone, suffers in a group, suffers as a citizen and suffers as a legion. Nowadays, the individual seeks meaning and enlightenment in everything that surrounds him, whether in digital media or on the Net, but the amount of information deposited in the network is such that one cannot confirm everything. And in the face of this we are in the uncomfortable position of those who do not know who to trust. The past has its subjective interpretations, the present is volatile and the future has become a multi-sensory image. So if the future has several meanings, there is no future, but "futures". This circumstance, on the other hand, also leads us to believe that despite the economy of the immediate based on presentness. However what we have is more "presentness" and this is notorious in our daily lives: no one is tuned, everyone is disconnected and there is no uniform sense. The narrative that kept a connected "whole" was multiplied and we got fragments of individuals, stories of nations, corporate speeches, advertising spots, commercial video clips. There is a lack of coherence, and in this incoherent world we choose the constellation of meaning we want. It does not matter if we choose something special, because there is nothing special anymore. Everything is personalized and specialized, so everything is self-defeating as such. The new homogeny is marked by singularity. We are all so different that we have become equally "singular." We do not know how to communicate, we have nothing in common except the products we buy and the services to which we subscribe. Humanity is more a term with many senses. Today is all "multi". The singular has no future in a universe of multiple choices and in a tyranny of the immediate.