A sentient environment for a subjective realm
Our lifestyle as much as our economic and social model, have brought us to build environments that are completely disconnected from the space we live in. We now live in a territory that is ubiquitously paralleled by a digital realm, and increasingly fragmented in the physical realm. Our environment has become a complex, unstable and multi-layered phenomenon, that is no longer structured according to independent entities – metropolises, cities, towns, villages – but into networks of interconnected nodes and individuals.
SOCIAL digital environment
“Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet.’
– ‘Brave New World of Digital Intimacy’, Clive Thompson | New York Times, Sept 5, 2008
Nowadays, the public space where the most relevant models of collective creation and self-management are found is beyond doubt Internet. For years we considered what is Digital as Virtual, as something away from reality, or at least as an alternative to reality. We confused what is real with what is physically present, forgetting how quickly web-based technologies became part of our daily life.