'This morning a fine idea came to me.'
'Let’s hear it.'
'I thought of making myself a beautiful wooden Marionette. It must be wonderful, one that will be able to dance, fence, and turn somersaults. With it I intend to go around the world, to earn my crust of bread and cup of wine. What do you think of it?'
Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
With the unstoppable spread of information technology, cyberspace has irreversibly entered the lives of half of humanity.
Digital code knows no boundaries and every aspect of contemporary existence - behaviours, opinions, desires and fears - can be converted into data that is available to be mined.
Is this digital info-sphere a new form of environment which hosts our interactions in a dimension outside the space-time continuum where the boundaries between what is virtual and what is real fade away? Or is it, simply put, just the latest technological articulation of homo sapiens, capable from the very beginning of the species to detach from what is current and transcend by means of a new language?
Whatever then answers, the evidences of every day life shows that by giving us unprecedented capabilities, digital technology has ended up reshaping our notion of what constitutes reality and subjectivity and led us to inhabit its radically new structures. The global covid pandemic highlighted our dependence on connectivity and accelerated technological developments further.
A new type of human - the 'digital native' - is a product of the last two decades' developments; people who have developed social and cognitive dynamics fully formed through the use of connected devices throughout their lives. For them, life online and offline no longer computes as different dimensions but constitute a hybrid environment in which their lives unfold.
With this ongoing project Lorenzo Maccotta aims to explore the impact of digital technology on contemporary global youth. Focusing on primary activities such as working, socialising, learning, relationships and gaming, the project aims to assess the first two decades of a new era - the era of homo digitalis.
'Let’s hear it.'
'I thought of making myself a beautiful wooden Marionette. It must be wonderful, one that will be able to dance, fence, and turn somersaults. With it I intend to go around the world, to earn my crust of bread and cup of wine. What do you think of it?'
Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
With the unstoppable spread of information technology, cyberspace has irreversibly entered the lives of half of humanity.
Digital code knows no boundaries and every aspect of contemporary existence - behaviours, opinions, desires and fears - can be converted into data that is available to be mined.
Is this digital info-sphere a new form of environment which hosts our interactions in a dimension outside the space-time continuum where the boundaries between what is virtual and what is real fade away? Or is it, simply put, just the latest technological articulation of homo sapiens, capable from the very beginning of the species to detach from what is current and transcend by means of a new language?
Whatever then answers, the evidences of every day life shows that by giving us unprecedented capabilities, digital technology has ended up reshaping our notion of what constitutes reality and subjectivity and led us to inhabit its radically new structures. The global covid pandemic highlighted our dependence on connectivity and accelerated technological developments further.
A new type of human - the 'digital native' - is a product of the last two decades' developments; people who have developed social and cognitive dynamics fully formed through the use of connected devices throughout their lives. For them, life online and offline no longer computes as different dimensions but constitute a hybrid environment in which their lives unfold.
With this ongoing project Lorenzo Maccotta aims to explore the impact of digital technology on contemporary global youth. Focusing on primary activities such as working, socialising, learning, relationships and gaming, the project aims to assess the first two decades of a new era - the era of homo digitalis.
