Su alcuni riflessi cognitivi nel tempo online delle nuove forme della comunicazione/informazione governate dagli algoritmi. Note e appunti per una ricerca

Abstract

Today, information spreads online, halfway between being free and its substantial disintermediation. In this context, some important cognitive processes have undergone a radical transformation, which coincides with a major crisis of reading and writing, along with a new way of remembering and forgetting things, for a common and uncommon memory. All this implies new dispositions to a subconscious which is further from any re-enactment or control. One would say that it is a matter of being more or less intelligent or wise in a broader digital sense: that is, it is still a matter that concerns one’s own mental health in general, with a continual digression towards what would otherwise be known as digital dementia. On such premises, where is the boundary between our intelligence and the artificial one today? How far has machine learning gone in its quest for understanding, for an interpretation of our online experiences, for those of us who are an integral part of a network of things that has gone far beyond the extension of our bodies? Certainly, Google with its PageRank dominates the search we conduct, directs our daily interests, shapes our most hidden desires. This causes behavioural short circuits from which it is often difficult to escape, beyond the substantial opacity in which all of this takes place. Inside this maze of new political constitutions, halfway between our being real and virtual, mysterious algorithms dominate our lives, whose implementation and government nowadays constitute the castle of power in its new branches, with its magical and secret nature that makes it the new mathesis universalis of our contemporary relationships.