Credo

intro con molto

Allow me please, to explain my point of view. The way things seem to be going, in a not so distant future reading and writing the psychological and physical spaces around us, personal and collective, natural, artificial or virtual, i.e. our environment, will demand being competent in any form of communication. This will probably include a mixture of sound (speech, music and in fact any sound one can produce), graphics (writing, photography, video, or, as in the case of sound, any icon you can produce), some sort of computer programming and other forms of reading and writing with which we are now perhaps less familiar or cannot even imagine. Whatever it takes to get or to deliver the message...

the meaning of reality

What we call reality is probably (who's to know...?) one single entity but to assess it and express our views on it we are forced to slice it through our discrete senses and to rely on all sorts of different tools. Reality is probably singular. Communicating with precision with it and about it, and analyzing it is nevertheless a complex task that is getting increasingly tougher, its forms and tools having a manifold character. This increasing complexity doesn't necessarily mean we're becoming better at it or even that we understand better what is going on around us (sometimes I think we don't...). It simply means that it's getting trickier. And the use of these new tools has its consequences as well.

the reality of reality

I have to recognize that we presently do not deal with this in a satisfactory way. Perhaps this is, as anthropologist John Collier Jr. puts it in a book titled Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method, the result of “the fragmentation of modern life (which) makes it difficult to respond to the whole view (...).” Collier notes that “we have drifted out of an embracing relationship with our surroundings, usually dealing only with portions of our environment,” further states that “unquestionably the personal blindness that obscures our viewing is related to the detachment possible in our urban, mechanized society. We learn to see only what we pragmatically need to see.” And we do not listen. Not even what we need to.

I'm using the word listening in a literal sense but also in a broader one as used by Pierre Lévy in an inspiring book titled Collective Intelligence. “Listening”, Lévy writes, “consists in making visible or audible, in coaxing forth the ideas, arguments, facts, evaluations, inventions, and relations used to weave a social reality, a social body, in the very depths of its being: projects, individual abilities, original modes of relation or contractualization, organizational

experiments, etc.”

Either we manage to cope with our many present predicaments, or -this is my strong opinion- our future as a species may be no brighter than that of the Neanderthals'.

my understanding of the word mirage

Years ago Buckminster Fuller cried 'Utopia or Oblivion'! Collier's whole view may, on the other hand, very well turn out to be simply a product of our imagination. A mirage if you will. Mirage or oblivion anyone?