lunedì 30 dicembre 2013

On the eras of the mind

Days of holiday, days of rest, days of work, days of reflection. And these days I happened to re-examine a thought I recently had on the last years. But let's start from the beginning: Man has always represented life as meta-object: From the divine who wrote the book of human history that represents the small amount of power/control that mankind had on the elements and events, to the theatrical performances within theatrical performances of Shakespeare with the life that is represented as a stage. And today? In this age of relativism and with the lack of strong visions, what is the representation of the world? I believe that the most organic vision is the first cover of the New Yorker in 2014 . Each story can be analyzed and dissected with precision focusing attention on each individual actor. You can say "but it's not true, it's just a coincidence." Well, it happens that in this era of ease of production , some of the most interesting games on the great sagas ( The Godfather , some of the Star Wars ) , are based on the fact that the story is sacred and already told, but it's the details of the secondary characters which are analyzed and experienced by the player. It so happens that Harry Potter fans are asking for the author to go back on the stories of Harry, but analyzing the point of view of another of the protagonists. In politics "solid" parties are weakening, while "fluid" parties become more of a reality, for better or for worse, and with the weaker parties disappears more and more the approach of membership voting while there is an increase in opinion voting. Is it a conscious choice? Maybe not, but it is a part of the spirit of our time. But when does it start? And here we come to what I think is the ideal name of this time. It is the time of Ulysses. Not the Homeric hero, but Joyce's Ulysses, the little heroic story of Leopold Bloom, a John Smith, who lives a normal life and whose stories are told of a day from the points of view of different characters. This is the time of everyday heroes, fighting against the traffic, the queues at the counters, the bureaucracy, the idiocy . This is the time of everyday heroes who have points of view and different histories. This is the time of everyday heroes who lose and who win.
The real challenge today is to get to exploit this difference: exploiting the fact that many of these heroes coming from different paths arrive at the same conclusions, everyone with its own cultural baggage. Reading and understanding this is every day more complex, but this is the challenge of the future for journalism, for those who want to tell stories, for those who want to imagine a new way of doing things. There is no longer unidirectional communication, but the end user is no longer just a "utor", in the Latin sense, which uses passively the information, the tools, but it is an "actor", in the Latin sense, who acts, processes, and creates a vision of a phenomenon and/or a reality.

Happy 2014

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