through europe

Tempo fa un amico mi scriveva: “Ho saputo che da qualche settimana stai litigando su Facebook con ****, che nel mondo del giornalismo italiano e’ un astro nascente. Stai attento, che per il mestiere che fai e’ pericoloso.” Non era la prima volta che ricevo consigli del genere, e non era la prima volta che ne conoscevo le ragioni. Quante volte mi sono detto: sii piu’ cauto, commenta solo quanto necessario; clicca “mi piace” quando non e’ compromettente; evita un linguaggio acido e polemico. Magra e’ la consolazione di non essere solo in questa debolezza. Un altro amico mi confessava:  ”Quando leggo la maggior parte dei giornali online mi faccio prendere da un moto di rabbia… A volte non riesco a fare a meno di intervenire, condividere, dire la mia. Ma per il mio lavoro e’ imbarazzante. A volte creo profili fittizi. O resto anonimo.”

 

Non e’ una sorpresa che la struttura dei social media e di Internet 2.0 in generale si basi sulla tendenza umana a condividere sensazioni e informazioni. Sulla nostra nostra incapacita’ di autocontrollo, sulla nostra mancanza di disciplina interiore. Il problema e’ che i social media rendono sempre piu’ trasparenti le nostre vite in una cultura che fa dipendere il nostro sviluppo sociale da una miriade di segni, di dettagli, di esami da superare. Rendendoci cosi’ vittime della nostra stessa addiction.

Stuff

 

The supposed invasion of the being by the having has been a recurrent theme throughout the history of Western civilization. Long before the advent of capitalism, one’s material possessions and social status in the community were already deeply intertwined. It was not by accident that the mention of a king in the pages of the Iliad was often followed by the endless list of his possessions, as if the number of sheep and pigs one possessed helped in some way to express the personality of the individual.

 

As time went by, the crass simplicity of the lists of the Iliad, turned into a more sophisticated catalogue of belongings. As already noted by Suetonius, first, and by Sallust later, at the time of the Roman empire fashion had already entered the equation of material wealth and social subjectivity. Above a certain threshold of wealth, It wasn’t just the sheer amount of stuff that one owned that was used to define his (rarely her) social status, but it was what he owned. His possessions did not simply have to be opulent and abundant – they also had to be filtered by the whims of fashion.

 

This trend proved unstoppable even during the so-called dark ages, and when private wealth could not keep pace with a minimum level of sophistication, the Church stepped in by prodigally investing in the assertion of its hegemony over fashion. If, out of laziness, we did not want to look back to those remote times for proof, we would simply have to look at the obsession for fashionable opulence of the current Pope, Benedictus XVI, rightly considered by many as the reincarnation of a medieval Pope in present times.