Prima e dopo Internet. Prima e dopo la Pandemia

I have said it before: the "threads" of a bibliomaniac as I think I am, are books. As are the links, the "threads" of the webomaniac. After all, the books and the links are twin brothers, born at different ages, but actually contemporaries. The first, lined up on the shelves of the world. The latter, indissolubly linked by telematic time. They are the same as the global web that is the Web.Links are an essential part of building pages. The concept of hypertext, to which the Net is intrinsically linked, cannot ignore links.

They are the foundation of the digital revolution. Thanks to them, reading becomes reticular, horizontal and multidimensional, abandoning the classic type of linear document. The new digital usability means short pages, lots of links. To capture the attention of the Internet user, it is necessary to be concise and go straight to the heart of the matter. The navigator does not have a passive approach to the medium, as happens for television and, in a certain way, also for traditional reading.

The user on the Web is active: he can / wants to interact, he can / wants to choose paths and contents, he has an extraordinary wealth of offer that invites him to quickly change destination. For this reason the Web is made up of short and direct texts. Length is the enemy of attention: after the first 5 lines of a newspaper column, the reader abandons the article, if he has not been "captured" in the meantime. You can easily imagine what it means to be online. The possibility of "escape" is much easier after a few words. So short and direct texts.

Skeptics have called the Internet a tool that pushes for simplification and superficiality. Aside from the fact that the depth of a certain content never lies in its length, these skeptics simply demonstrate that they have no understanding of the digital idea. An in-depth study, in fact, is a must for sites that want to have some dignity. But it is always reached through links.

Links are the weapon that hypertext has at its disposal to create different reading paths, at different levels, even very thorough, without losing the reader on the way. The latter thus finds himself following a flexible, orderly and effective path. In short, if WWW stands for "World Wide Web", for me it also means "Where there is a Will there is a Way", that is: "Where there is a Will there is a Way", which remains above all that desire to discover the world with different eyes from how we have known and shared it up to now.

This is not a simple transformation placed at the center of change, which leaves no trace. Instead, it is a real, necessary and inevitable evolution, the most typical natural process.

The book of which you see the cover on the side I wrote it only three years ago, yet it seems a century has passed. It represents the progress, empowerment, improvement of a living being (which is me) as it grows to a later stage.

I keep writing, day after day, because maybe that's the only thing I know how to do. Writing to understand who I am, what I think and do. I wrote it before the pandemic arrived, almost thirty years after the arrival of the Internet. I do it every day to gratify myself above all. I feel I can say, without fear of being presumptuous, that in the path of these four twenty-year-olds of life that I have had to live (so far!), In terms of the various experiences I have had, I have undergone not only a transformation but an inevitable evolution.

Thanks to "digital". The same, but not identical, evolution awaits me after two years of pandemic. This continuous evolution always puts the human being at the center, with his behavior, his thoughts, his actions. It helps not to make the mistake of considering digital transformation as "something" connected only to the processes, products and services that technology offers us.

I still don't know what the changes will be for a dinosaur like me after the pandemic. I can't even imagine those of others. For example, those of my niece Chiara, belonging to the so-called Zeta generation

The roots of the "digital" come from afar, from the Latin "digitus", in turn from "dicere", and again from the proto Indo-European "deik-" "indicate, show". As for me, they come from my ink-stained fingers while in his printing shop my father taught me to read and write, taking the lead letters from the crates in the composition room. The “pandemic” roots still remain mysterious, unscientific, almost out of this world, at least the one known so far.

I have undergone and faced countless transformations over the course of these decades. I have proof of this in a direct and personal way, not only as a protagonist, but also as a witness, character and interpreter of myself. I, like all other human beings, aware or not, of being in the stream. The so-called digital one. But I'm still not aware of where the flow of the post-pandemic current that contrasts with the digital one will take me.

Suddenly we discover that the need for connection not only with myself, but also with others and with everything that surrounds us in the digital vision of reality, disappears and enters into strong conflict not only with myself, with myself, but with the whole world. We are suddenly required, even, an inevitable distancing, beyond a physical defense, masking and vaccinating ourselves.

The pleasant sensation of feeling alive and active in the digital world disappears, navigating in a world that we had deluded ourselves to make ours. The post-pandemic inevitably pushes us towards a different way of being, in solitude and isolation. The experience of the Net comes into contact and collides with it in her tragic nature: the Pandemic. More than thirty years have passed since I discovered that reality that was called "hypertext", on which the legendary Commodore 64 built its success and made information technology almost a popular mass sport, quickly changing our way to live.

I was able to experience mine it by disseminating countless traces of my wandering on the Net. Perhaps this term may seem an understatement, if I think about how useful the cultural experience I have gained in recent decades has been useful to me. All digital tracks, so many to forget them because they are too many and all experimental.

On the other hand, it is not a mystery, for those who have become a navigator of this reality, that no one had foreseen a world as "new" as this one, with a terminology that is as vague as ever, but as interesting as it is disturbing: "a new world"..

 A reality that is always different, evanescent, iridescent, "liquid". But that does not "wet" you, but it changes you, without you even noticing it.

You believe that nothing has happened but then suddenly you feel that something in you has changed and you feel the need to go further. The 100 lost things are lost in the sea, indeed in the ocean of a thousand and a thousand new "things" found and discovered. Here are some that struck me, as I read them from the index of the book:

boredom, the comma, getting lost, losing the ticket, the bad photos, the phone call, the doctor's prescriptions, the flea market, the shop windows, the loneliness, the letters to the newspaper, the newspaper boy, postcards, a good night's sleep, remembering numbers, paper, personal opinions, traveling alone, phone calls, vocabulary, patience, tour guides, civilization, leaving a message, maps, empathy, handwritten letters, punctuation, scrapbooks, weather forecasts, emergency numbers, attention span, textbook, gaze, self-employment, paper newspapers and weeklies, booklet checks ...

Pamela Paul, American journalist and writer, offers us an essay, in form of very original and personal short aphorisms that obviously reflect the American social and cultural reality in which she lives and works. Not a few also respond to our reality. Almost all situations have undergone a transformation and an evolution. We are all too familiar with the cascading effects of the Internet on our daily existence, whether from the screen we touch, or from the button we press when we wake up in the morning. From what we do when we get out of bed to what we worry about as we fall asleep at night.

From the details of our commute and what happens once we get to work and how we reunite as a family when we get home. The ways we negotiate the school day and summer vacation. How we see each other and how we treat each other. How we grow and how we get older. We know all this. Less remarked is what we did before. We immediately forgot it or we are about to do so.

But the Internet has also made us feel the leaks of what we had left in the physical world "out there". Even without that viral push, one by one, objects, concepts, habits and ideals that once mattered to us have fallen, sometimes with little more than a whisper, disappeared onto the Internet. It can be difficult to recover what life was like before. Much of our life is filtered through a pixelated lens.

One of the paradoxes of the Internet is that while it opened the world , it also made the world that we did not know before in its infinite folds seem infinite and ineffable to us, now we discover it small. Spend a few hours browsing online and that world itself can feel mean, repetitive, and flat. This is a book about our losses, but also about many things that we miss and that we hardly knew existed. Things we said goodbye to without meaning to. We still do not know exactly what their loss means or what their absence will mean for our existence. This is the price we have to pay for change.

But what book and what loss am I referring to at this point in my post? I notice that it has become quite long, longer than I had in mind. Also very different from what I set out to write while reading Pamela Paul's newly released book on the lost before the Internet on the Kindle. We will need to write a lot about what we have lost with the experience of the Pandemic, before and after.

There was a before and there will be an after that we have yet to know. It will be possible to do this only when we are out of it. The Internet and Pandemic are destined to become real watersheds, timepieces that drastically and clearly divide these two moments in the history of humanity, in the same way we use to say "before Christ" (BC) and " after Christ "(d. C.).

Nothing will be the same as before the Internet, nothing will be the same as before and after the Pandemic. Twenty years later, we can begin to write history before and after the Internet. Before writing the one on the Pandemic we must be able to annihilate Covid 19. Nobody wants "him" to write about him ...