Catalogo Experimenta 06

ledge”. The invention of printing with mobile characters was
certainly an extraordinary means for spreading culture and
to allow low cost filing of numerous copies of each volume,
but it has not mutated the method by which information has
been handed down.
The collective memory has been entrusted for thousands of
years to transcription, only in the XIX century was the use of
different instruments started. Photographs and then the cinema,
the radio, and the television, opened new roads for the
transmission of non text forms of information but the support
for the filing of what is produced have remained delicate
and perishable. The same books, printed in the last century on
types of paper and ink to last over time, have become unreliable
for the filing knowledge
The increasing volume of data produced in the modern civilisation
has found in the process of digitalisation and the
spread on-line two elements of incredible power to create a
collective memory perennially accessible. A system capable of
incorporating within individual memory also, thanks to the
lowering of the technological and economic threshold for the
spread of the information.
It is the realisation of the visionary ideas of Vannevar
Bush who, in 1945, wrote: - Consider a future device for
individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file
and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random,
“memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual
stores all his books, records, and communications,
and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with
exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate
supplement to his memory.-.
In this vision of Bush there still lacked the concept of Web
but, on the trail of the first developments of the elaborations
of that time, it already seemed evident the possibility of
increasing the capacity of management of individual single
data in the future.
DIGITAL CONVERGENCE AND INTEGRATION OF THE
MEDIA
The success of the information and communication technologies
has pushed the development of the media towards
an integration which, today, is evident to all. The portal
of Experimenta06 is direct evidence of this inasmuch as it
offers to navigators the possibility of using innovative media
such as: web-radio, web-tv, Podcast, blog, Glocalmap
(www.experimenta.to.it).
The digital convergence and the integration of the media are
still in a phase of strong growth. A conjecturable scenario
for information computer technologies in the coming years
is characterised by a greater transparency of the technology
itself. The best interface possible is, without doubt, that whose
presence is not felt. The more immediate the use of any
equipment whatsoever and does not need a preliminary study,
inasmuch as the same can be considered user friendly.
Unfortunately, the present hardware and software systems
are very far from such a result, and the user often finds himself
in conditions which require specialised competence to
face them.
The growing pervasiveness of the information computer systems
and their use at this rate of real and proper cognitive
prosthesis could not but favour the development of new forms
of interface, always more adapted to be used by persons little
prepared from the information technology point of view.
The human brain will always know how to integrate even
more the digital information coming from different sources
in its processes but it will be the sharing of the resources for
calculating where the new improvement will take place: from
CMC to EMC (Immediate Elaboration by the Computer) The
access to the Web does not signify any longer only the immediate
availability of information of all types but, above all, the
access to resources of shared elaboration; invisible but always
present and fully integrated into daily life.
INDEX SCIENTIFIC STUDIES
149