Social media: that is, the free disinfestation of critical thinking
Do you know what the free manifestation of thought was, in the intentions of the constituent fathers who drafted article 21 of the Constitution? An inviolable right. And do you know what the free manifestation of thought is, in the intentions of the godparents of current social networks? An unpleasant side effect. Indeed, one of their (undeclared) objectives is, in reality, the free disinfestation of critical thinking. We must start from this observation if we want to imagine a different world. A world that tends to resemble the one drawn by our Supreme Charter of 1948 and not the dystopian one prefigured by George Orwell's 1984 novel.
To understand, we must agree on the concept of "free expression of thought" in the constitutional sense. Which is not about bragging about what we ate on lunch break or heralding the fresh purchase, the latest journey, the new love. These things here are exactly the inessential, childish, irrelevant bla bla bla that Zuckerberg and his associates are fine with. Indeed, lorsignori have invented the "social" just and "only" for this. To express our "belly" and our "heart", so as to put our "head" asleep. In their (diabolical) intentions, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter etc. are just digital collectors of personal information necessary for two reasons: to sell and influence us. Or, if you prefer, sell us “influences”, temptations, inclinations to then be directed in a very specific direction.
A recent documentary entitled "The social dilemma" gives us an excellent summary of the real reasons, the real reasons, why we were given this wonderful universal training ground for the "expression of thought" of social networks. It is free and, like all free things, it has an unfortunate drawback: it transforms us from content producers to products with a (single) content. In the documentary mentioned, it is explained how these tools have the fundamental purpose of "profiling us": to obtain, that is, from each of our clicks, from each of our twits, from each of our scrolls, an increasingly perfect and detailed outline of what we are in intimate of our (once unfathomable) depths: tastes, desires, habits, attitudes, vulnerability. In other words, thanks to the prodigious predictive capacity of computer algorithms, they wanted to know us – and they did – more than we had ever known ourselves.
Which is then the first and last objective of the most ruthless dictatorships: never fully realized as today in the era of global "democracy". But, as we said at the beginning, there is an (unwanted) side effect of this monumental operation of individual and collective conditioning. Many "users" do not limit themselves to talking about the freshly digested meal or posting purchases, travels, loves. Many "users" have made up their minds to freely express a critical thought about the world. Call it political and social analysis, and therefore understanding and denunciation, if you like.
Social media have thus become (also) an "Indian reserve" of free-flowing intelligences which cannot find space in the "official", "competent", "reliable" (and often corrupt) media. Ergo, we need to stop just complaining. When Facebook or Youtube censors an American president or an awkward blogger, they're just doing their dirty job. We have all signed a contract that allows it. We must rather think of a world in which not only the power to do so is taken away from them, but in which the area of "critical thinking" and free from them (inadvertently) created becomes everyone's and for everyone.
Francesco Carraro
www.francescocarraro.com
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The article I social: that is, the free disinfestation of critical thinking comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/i-social-ovvero-la-libera-disinfestazione-del-pensiero-critico/ on Sat, 27 Feb 2021 08:21:26 +0000.