Catalogo Experimenta 06

INDEX SCIENTIFIC STUDIES
148
management of information of the netizens 9 , there is a
cultural, social, economic transformation not immediately
perceivable from the outside but capable of changing
the world.
FAST, FASTER, INSTANTANEOUS
Perhaps the strongest stimulus for intensive use of technology
in all its aspects comes from the desire to be the fastest
(Gleick, 1999). Like the means of transport, from the carriage
to the airplane, they are born to shorten the time of movement
of persons and things, information instruments were
developed to limit to the maximum the time needed to find
and elaborate data.
It is enough to walk down the aisle of a supermarket to realise
the desire for speed which permeates our society: instant coffee,
ready-made soups, portions of cooked food in 60 seconds
putting it directly in the micro wave oven (packaging included),
substitute snacks, auto-refrigerating and auto-heating
food... but this is not enough: you must be multi-tasking 10 .
The capability of simultaneously carrying out more operations
is not a novelty of our times. We are all able to sustain a conversation
while driving a car or writing a letter while listening
to music, but these are activities which involved processes
of a different nature. Very few are capable of following logical
thoughts that are really parallel. It is with the use of the
computer that speed and parallel levels of processes without
precedent have been reached, available to (nearly) everyone.
The acceleration of the single processes is no longer sufficient,
it is required to make them parallel and a computer
connected to Web is the best way of taking advantage of our
natural inclination to multi-tasking.
ALWAYS CONNECTED
The boom of cellular telephones, technology introduced into
Italy in 1990 and by now widely diffused in all social classes,
shows that the desire to communicate, always and wherever,
is very strong. Cellular phones exist to use under the shower,
in the car, on a motor cycle, on a building site, in the operating
theatre; models that ring, flash lights, vibrate... and connect
to Internet.
The passage from analogical to digital telephones has opened
to the door to the transformation of the telephone as a simple
vehicle for vocal communication to a technological picklock,
capable of opening doors of data transmission and, therefore,
sounds, images, texts, interactive objects and all that can be
converted into bit form.
In practice, this signifies that the access to the Web has become
mobile allowing users to be always on-line and therefore
favouring a process of progressive integration of the use of
the Web in daily activities.
The present main limitation, is that the lack of bandwidth
in cellular communications, has brought about the spread
of the Wi-Fi connection working in restricted areas, such as
public buildings, hotels, stations and airports, but at high
speed, allowing to take advantage of the amount of time
spent in this place connecting to Internet as if one was in
one’s own office.
INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY
What our society is, that which it is capable of expressing, for
better or for worse, is the fruit of the elaboration of what was,
of its memory. Every individual, without memory becomes a
being without the possibility of a social life, as the terrible
illnesses which damage this functioning of the brain.
Since childhood one is used to generate information, draw,
write, file, we all have our personal data bank, whether small
or big. The libraries collect works that are worthy to be placed
at the disposal of everything and handed down to posterity.
This system has worked more or less well until now and since
always has represented the principal way to transmit “know-