The immense power of the internet and new technologies made us believe that the growing number of connected people would inevitably lead to a smaller and more cosmopolitan world. Nothing more fake. The human tendency to team up and take an interest in what surrounds us means that most of our interactions, online and offline, are with realities with which we have much in common.
“We need to start seeing ourselves as citizens of the world and adopt a cosmopolitan approach,” says Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices and a lecturer at the MediaLab civic media center, in the volume entitled “Rewie. Digital cosmopolitans in the era of globality” (Egea 2014, 280 pages, 26 euros).
"An idea that is anything but new - continues Zuckerman -, the Greek philosopher Diogenes who lived in the fourth century BC already spoke about it", who declared himself a cosmopolitan because he refused to "define his own identity on the basis of the city where he was born or that where he lived".
It's been 2.500 years since then, but only recently have many of us had the opportunity to interact with people from other parts of the world. The advances made by information technologies have not changed our habits too much and technology thus ends up disconnecting and detaching us.
Indeed, the widespread advent of the Internet "offers us a range of new ways to follow what is happening in other parts of the world - says Zuckerman - but our media diet, from the paper newspaper to online social networks, helps us find what they want, but not always what we need”.
Is there really a need to understand our complex and interconnected world? It is up to us to create new tools that help us understand the voices we listen to and what we ignore.
“With a fraction of the mental power used to build the Internet as we know it, we have the ability to activate a great network capable of helping us discover, understand and embrace an ever-widening world. We can, and we must, reconfigure this general picture”, says the author.
In his book, Zuckerman proposes three solutions to reconnect the web and counter this tendency towards self-segregation: the first is to follow those he defines as "bridge figures", bloggers capable of translating and contextualizing ideas from one culture to another; the second is being able to count on transparent translations, because it goes without saying that an interconnected world is a polyglot world. The potential to know and learn new things expands, but so does the possibility of misunderstanding.
Finally, the third is to program "serendipity", a concept that is abused and misunderstood today, and which could be defined as the discovery, between causality and sagacity, of things that were not being sought at all.
