Everybody can remember when, as a child, our parents told us not to get too close to the TV. That was “close.” Then the personal computer came and we got closer. Even closer with laptops. Then we went closest with smartphones.

The information which appears on a screen almost compels us in following it with our eyes. Giving attention to visual novelties activates the ancient neurophysiological system which rewards us with a pleasurable dopamine release. In ancient times, paying attention to a visual stimulus gave more chances for survival, so it was rewarded in pleasurable ways. Since any visual novelty was potentially a predator or a prey, our neurophysiological system developed reward systems to give us more chances of survival.

One of the causes of the Internet, videogames and in general addiction to electronic gadgets, could be this need to follow the many external visual stimuli. What happens on the screen brings our attention to what’s going on, thus activating our reward system based on dopamine.

Even though we look at many inputs in fast sequence, our field of vision and the movements of the eyes are very limited, and in many cases we end up staring blankly at the screen. Many years ago, an artist friend of mine, knowing I was spending much time on a computer, gave me a small painting depicting a landscape where the eye could relax in an unfocused way. Very kind and useful, but I didn’t really use it since the pressures of the external inputs were stronger.

This act of staring brings both a limited eye movement and the slowing down of the frequency of blinking. When we spend many hours every day staring at a screen, something is probably going to change on a neurophysiological level.

We know that moving the eyes in different directions can improve memory and the communications between the brain hemispheres. The article of the British Psychological Society says:

One hundred and two participants listened to 150 words, organized into 10 themes (e.g. types of vehicle), read by a male voice. Next, 34 of these participants moved their eyes left and right in time with a horizontal target for 30 seconds (saccadic eye movements); 34 participants moved their eyes up and down in time with a vertical target; the remaining participants stared straight ahead, focussed on a stationary target.
After the eye movements, all the participants listened to a mixture of words: 40 they’d heard before, 40 completely unrelated new words, and 10 words that were new but which matched one of the original themes. In each case the participants had to say which words they’d heard before, and which were new.
The participants who’d performed sideways eye movements performed better in all respects than the others: they correctly recognised more of the old words as old, and more of the new words as new. Crucially, they were fooled less often by the new words whose meaning matched one of the original themes – that is they correctly recognised more of them as new. This is important because mistakenly identifying one of these ‘lures’ as an old word is taken as a laboratory measure of false memory.

Eye movements improve creativity as well as the resolution of problems. Science Blogs describe eye-tracking research by Grant and Spivey (2003). They showed that people solved a medical problem spontaneously without any hints when they looked at a picture depicting a human body through moving the eyes in and out of the pictured body. This is called “embodied cognition,” meaning that some parts of the body reflect an internal mental process externally.

There are also hypotheses which say that the communication between the cerebral hemispheres is improved by moving the eyes in different directions and that could be a support to psychological therapy.
So we know that rotating the eyes leads to an improvement of memory, an increase of creativity, and a greater exchange of information between the brain hemispheres. Information overload, little movement of the eyes, and decreased creative and memory capacities join in mutual feedback. In this respect, I sometimes practice a light neurophysiological exercise by rotating the ocular globes in each direction for several minutes.

I also noted that maintaining the gaze on a near object for a long period of time decreased my ability to see things in a wide perspective and to observe the correlation between information distant from each other. I tend to see details but less the broader perspective. I find it fundamental to take the gaze to a distance in moments of reflection, in a relaxed and unfocused mode. Everywhere I am I tend to stay on high floors with a wide view. Further, keeping the visual focus always at the same distance and at the same angle diminishes the blinking, symbolically bringing fixation of even a thought.

If this fixation is bad enough for adults, it can be even worse for children. There’s strong pressure in prematurely developing the intellectual aspects of children, but much research has demonstrated that children learn mainly through their bodies and how that will give them academic success later. So give your child an early exposure to computers and you’ll most probably make him dumber instead of more intelligent and creative.

Furthermore, close contact with a screen at an early age could even interfere with some neurophysiological development. Alliance for Childhood published Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood (College Park, 2001). On page 22, they write:

Infants and toddlers develop their visual-spatial awareness first through cross-movements in space, such as crawling, and then by gradually fine-tuning their hand-eye coordinations, until their eyes become adept not only at following their hands, but at leading their hands in finer and finer motions. Finally, after many integrated experiences of seeing, touching, and moving their hands and the rest of their bodies in three-dimensional space, young children develop an appreciation of visual forms as real objects, and the capacity to visualize objects without actually seeing them. Too much time spent in passively looking at two-dimensional representations of objects on a computer screen – or a television set – may interfere with this developing capacity.

Then, at page 23:

Grade school children need even more frequent breaks from close computer work than adults do. That’s because their muscular and nervous systems are still developing. It’s not until about the age of 11 or 12 that their capacity to balance and coordinate the movement and the focusing of both eyes together is fully mature.

At that age most kids in Western countries were already familiar with screens for years through videogames, gadgets and computers. First, we give them screens to “enhance” their minds, then we give them Ritalin to “fix” them neurophysiologically.

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Ebook readers and announcements of titles are multiplying. After at least 15 years of false starts, this time it looks like ebooks are going to take over, driven by products like Amazon Kindle ebook reader.

When I was a book publisher I used to go to the Frankfurt Buchmesse. It was around 1993 when there were big announcements about “The Year of the E-book” (it was spelled with a hyphen then), which would soon replace paper books.

The ground floor of the book fair was dedicated to ebooks, but publishers didn’t really rush to convert their titles into a digital format. At that time, as a young publisher of computer science books, I blamed the conservative nature of the traditional publishing industry and experimented with digital formats. As it happened with other digital publishers, the market didn’t answer positively. So I blamed the conservative nature of the reader instead and kept publishing paper books, which were successful.

There were more waves of the craze for ebooks, a bigger one a few years later. We tried to believe in that second wave as well, but even this time there wasn’t much interest. In the meanwhile the Internet came into our lives and I noticed, starting from the US, that something was changing in the traditional book publishing industry.

Books were becoming smaller and the writing style more journalistic. Some publisher colleagues told me that “the reader doesn’t have much time any more to read complicated and big books, as they are used to Web pages,” or that “the writing style should be more catchy and entertaining.”

I won’t blame the Internet for this per se, but for sure it represented the low point of the prolongued attention capacity, already weakened by fast TV edits, by the remote control and the number of available channels and overall by the information overload industry.

The new generations of ebook readers improved much on readability and it seems that this new wave is the one which is finally about to grow in popularity. The thing is, it won’t be the same thing about books any more. Even though ebooks won’t substitute paper books, they will get an important share of the traditional book market, which will probably reduce – as we have already seen about the traditional newspaper market.

But…things just change and we shouldn’t be afraid of that, right? We shouldn’t be overly attached to the traditional media but be open to technological advances, as the techno-enthusiasts (and the ones who have direct economic interests in it) tell us.

True, but it could anyway be interesting to know what’s going to change in our inner reading experience through ebook technology. Ebooks will probably set different standards about length and writing style, and much time won’t pass before they will “open” to links and to connecting with other people who read the same book, making the reading experience more social and shared. Maybe videos will be available when the ebook readers technology will improve. Advertisement will come too. Ebook readers and publishers are going to compete for developing more and more features, “enhancing” the experience.

Wonderful, but some things give their best with less instead of more. For instance, organic food is healthier because there are no preservatives, no chemicals, no GMO, no colorants.

Ebooks won’t make books extinct: they will just eclipse the inner experience of reading books, in spite of what tech people say that supports don’t matter. What are usually taken into consideration are the technical issues around clarity of the screen, available memory, and the facility of reading in different light conditions. But since many technologically-oriented people don’t give much attention to the subtle inner changes, for many of them it’s probably the same. What matters for them is what we can do, not what is being done on us by technology.

Being alone with a book, electronic or paper or whatever, with no Internet, no links, no videos, no electronics and nothing and nobody else popping up on the screen while we read, will probably become rare, but it is that very solitude which can give non-interrupted mutual feedback between the words, as the semantic bricks of our awareness, and the depths of the soul.

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Pew Internet released a report on Social Isolation and New Technology contradicting previous studies on the subject:

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

I also think that Facebook users have real-life connections as well, but since Facebook has spread massively, my feeling is that the pre-existing real-life relationships are being sucked into Facebook too.

In the beginning, TV used to show and describe reality, and people would talk about what happened on TV. Starting around 20 years ago, I noticed that TV talked more and more about what happened on TV itself in a self-referencing way. I saw that mostly through other peoples’ TV sets since I don’t own a set myself. Seeing TV only rarely makes me more aware of the macro-changes. At a certain point, TV didn’t just show and talk about reality any more, but made reality itself, which was then commented upon by TV itself and by other media.

The Net followed a similar but slightly different path. A few years ago, the Net was limited to a small percentage of the population and it was immediately self-referential, encouraged by the easy mechanism of the link system.

Then, as social networks spread, people populated Facebook and similar sites. Recently, I noticed that real-life conversations got more into “what happened on Facebook” and this in itself fuelled the growth of the social network itself. People didn’t want to feel “left out” so they flocked to Facebook. Suddenly, people would feel left out if they weren’t present on the Net and in its happenings, more than if they weren’t present in face-to-face meetings.

The Net got priority. Without it, many real meetings can’t happen anymore as they are organized as Facebook events. Since we spend more and more time online, without the Net, we could even become short of arguments in our real-life conversations.

Many people into technology welcome the interaction between the Net and real life, seeing that as something which balances both and which takes the Net out of a cage. The problem is that the process of digitalization of reality is quite greedy and tends to incorporate every aspect of reality, absorbing the wholeness of reality starting from the mental level, representing it digitally as if everything could be translated into bytes. So in the end, reality becomes sucked into the Net, which has to be lifestreamed or lifelogged in order to become realized. Reality can be considered real only when can become digitalized.

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There’s an unusual but apparent alliance between two philosophies which are barely aware of and rarely come into contact each other, which conjure against the physical reality and the body. The first “philosophy” is represented by what have variously been called Cyberspace, Technopoly, Cyburbia and other names.

I prefer to define it as “The Digitalization of Reality,” wherein more and more human activities are being translated into bytes. Work, communication, media, entertainment, friends, dating, sexuality, culture, shopping, politics and causes are among the growing number of human needs that have gone digital.

While the Internet was something which earlier we mostly visited, now we are inhabiting the virtual worlds full-time and engineer them according to our mental projections. The Cartesian dream of a mind without a body has almost been fulfilled (even though in his old age Descartes, in Passions of the Soul, affirmed that “the soul is jointly united to all the parts of the body”).

This separation has a long history of Western thought starting from the Judeo-Christian separation between body and soul up to people like the transhumanist Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, or the singularity guru Raymond Kurzweil who want to download the biological human mind to a safer mechanical medium in order to achieve nothing less than immortality.

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This is an updated article of an older post. Some time ago, Gmail added another “much-needed” feature we all were waiting to see (italics mine).

How often do you try to chat with somebody and they don’t respond because they just walked away from their computer? Or maybe you’re in the middle of chatting with them just as they need to leave. But you still need to tell them something – something really important like you’ve moved, where you’re meeting…or ice cream! We need ice cream! This is why we built a way to chat with your friends even when they’re away from their computers. Now you can keep the conversations going with a new Labs feature that lets you send SMS text messages right from Gmail. It combines the best parts of IM and texting: you chat from the comfort of your computer, and your friends can peck out replies on their little keyboards.

It is quite amazing to read so many words in a single paragraph which convey the meaning of need, abandonment, attachment, nourishment. The whole passage reminds one of a baby who doesn’t want to get detached from the  person who provides care and attention. Our primary object-relationships are being transferred to technology and, Mother Google provides us her umbilical cord and the milk to nourish us.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and I don’t think that those words have been chosen carefully to manipulate people’s psyches. The digitalization of reality has gone so far that we are now substituting every human need, even the most basic ones, with technology. So those words are just the natural outcome of our intimate relationship with technology.

This feature of Google will be a panacea for anxious people who can’t detach themselves from the machine and the people whom they chat with and need to keep the connection.

Of course, people can block or stop the SMS messages at any time, but the silence of becoming isolated from the Net could become too eerie to bear. The pressures of the unknown neglected inner self asking for attention will probably be pacified again with some gadget connected to the big mama-net with its sweet bytes flowing down reminding us that we aren’t isolated anymore.

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The digitalization of reality, in its race toward incorporating more and more of human life, is  well advanced in the area of the media, probably because the media are already a mental construction, a half-way between a direct approach to reality and a mental interpretation.

The media had their physical counterparts and supports which, in time, became less and less “embodied.” Music production – and especially music reproduction, for instance – went from heavy equipment to small MP3 readers. Now we have virtually no physical equipment any more for music, nor for movies and, books themselves are going digital, being contained in small memory chips.

Damasio demonstrated that the brain can’t be understood without the body and the emotions which inform thought and decisions. Analogously, a piece of information without a physical support misses something. As with thoughts, we can’t really detach the media from their physical counterparts. Our relationship with music, for instance, is a multi-sensorial one, being not only auditory, but tactile and visual as well. Beside that, music is a social experience too. And we should not forget that we can feel an attachment to the physical support of music (in the form of LPs or, less, CDs) and paper books or magazines.

The New York Times recently published an article, “Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge”, saying, “there is just too much information. We can have thousands of people sending us suggestions each day – some useful, some not. We have to read them, sort them and act upon them.”

I wrote in “Does the Internet Really Broaden Minds?” how the variety of sources available on the Net bring traffic only to a very restricted set of websites instead of broadening the scope of our search. The same applies to references to scientific papers and music where just 0.4 percent of tracks account for 80 percent of downloads. Researchers have found that when people are more connected to each other on the Net, they tend to concentrate on an even smaller number of sources.

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La digitalizzazione della realtà, nella sua corsa ad incorporare sempre più aspetti dell’umano, è particolarmente avanzata nell’area dei media, probabilmente perché questi sono già una costruzione mentale, una via di mezzo tra un contatto diretto con la realtà e un’interpretazione mentale.

I media hanno avuto i loro equivalenti fisici e i loro supporti i quali, nel tempo, sono diventati sempre meno “incarnati”. La produzione musicale, ad esempio, e in particolare la riproduzione della musica, è passata da pesanti attrezzature a minuscoli lettori MP3. Ora praticamente non abbiamo quasi più alcun supporto fisico per la musica, per i film e anche i libri stanno andando verso il digitale.

Damasio ha dimostrato che il cervello non può essere compreso senza il corpo e le emozioni che informano i pensieri e le decisioni. Analogamente, un frammento informativo senza un supporto fisico manca di qualcosa. Come per il pensiiero, non possiamo veramente separare i media dalle loro corrispondenze fisiche. La nostra relazione con la musica, ad esempio, è multi-sensoriale, non solamente uditiva, ma anche tattile e visiva. A parte ciò, la musica è un’esperienza sociale. E non va dimenticato che possiamo sviluppare un attaccamento anche per il supporto fisico della musica (nella forma di LP o, in misura minore, di CD), dei libri e delle riviste.

Recentemente, il New York Times ha pubblicato l’articolo “Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge”  (La serendipità persa nell’inondazione digitale), scrivendo “c’è troppa informazione. Possiamo avere migliaia di persone che ogni giorno ci mandano dei suggerimenti, alcuni utili, altri no. Dobbiamo leggerli, selezionarli, smistarli e agire su di essi”.

Nell’articolo “Internet ci porta all’apertura mentale?” ho scritto di come la varietà di fonti disponibili nella Rete porta traffico solamente ad un insieme molto ristretto di siti web, invece di espandere la portata della nostra ricerca. Lo stesso fenomeno si applica alle citazioni verso gli articoli scientifici e alla musica, dove solamente lo 0,4 percento dei brani rappresenta l’80 percento dei download. I ricercatori hanno scoperto che quando le persone sono più connesse tra di loro in Rete, tendono a concentrarsi su un numero di fonti ancora più ristretto.

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Low Tech Magazine presented the article titled “The monster footprint of digital technology” in which they show how the power consumption of our high-tech machines and devices is hugely underestimated:

When we talk about energy consumption, all attention goes to the electricity use of a device or a machine while in operation. A 30 watt laptop is considered more energy efficient than a 300 watt refrigerator. This may sound logical, but this kind of comparison does not make much sense if you don’t also consider the energy that was required to manufacture the devices you compare. This is especially true for high-tech products, which are produced by means of extremely material- and energy-intensive manufacturing processes… The energy consumption of electronic devices is skyrocketing…There are multiple reasons for the growing energy consumption of electronic equipment; more and more people can buy gadgets, more and more gadgets appear, and existing gadgets use more and more energy (in spite of more energy efficient technology – the energy efficiency paradox described here before).

However, most of the energy involved in electronics is not much about their use. Larger amounts of energy are being used for the production of the technology, the embodied energy.

The energy used to produce electronic gadgets is considerably higher than the energy used during their operation. For most of the 20th century, this was different; manufacturing methods were not so energy-intensive…Advanced digital technology has turned this relationship upside down. A handful of microchips can have as much embodied energy as a car… The embodied energy of the memory chip (of a computer) alone already exceeds the energy consumption of the laptop during its life expectancy of 3 years.

The trend in the manufacture of electronics is going toward more energy-intensive processes and heavier costs in terms of raw materials and resources. Did the fast development in computer processing speed and memory, coupled with the huge amount of energy needed for manufacturing them make them faster and more productive? Every Windows user knows that after one or two years of use the operating system becomes cluttered and slows down considerably.

Defragmenting the hard disk, cleaning the registry and uninstalling applications have little effect. The cooling fan runs often, often the hard disk works like hell with no apparent reason, operations get slower and slower. This can be blamed on the poorly-engineered Windows operating system, but even alternatives like Apple or Linux, though better, don’t come any closer to match the development in hardware at the software level

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In the middle of Twitter-mania and the push toward writing and reading fast, updated and short-lived information, it is good to be reminded about different ways of reading by two spiritual teachers from two very different paths. One is from Carlo Maria Martini.

The Christian tradition developed lectio divina (divine reading), a method in four steps: “lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio” (reading, reflecting, oration, meditation). Those successions are the products of theological and anthropological reflections on the way the believer approaches God’s word, in order to assimilate them and transform them in real life, in action. (Carlo Maria Martini, Lectio Divina e Pastorale: A Cura di Salvatore A. Panimolle, Ascolto della Parola e Preghiera, La “Lectio Divina”, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1987, p. 217).

The second is from the Indian mystic Osho.

To read is to know a certain art. It is to get into deep sympathy. It is to get into a sort of participation. It is a great experiment in meditation. But if you read the Gita the same way as you read novels you will miss it. It has layers and layers of depth. Hence, path – every day once has to repeat. It is not a repetition; if you know how to repeat it, it is not a repetition. If you don’t know, then it is a repetition.
Just try it for three months. Read the same book – you can choose any small book – every day. And don’t bring your yesterday to read it: just again fresh as the sun rises in the morning – again fresh as flowers come this morning, again fresh. Just open the Gita again, excited, thrilled. Again read it, again sing it, and see. It reveals a new meaning to you.
It has nothing to do with yesterday and all the yesterdays when you were reading it. It gives you a certain significance today, this moment, but if you bring your yesterdays with you, then you will not be able to read the new meaning. Your mind is always full of meaning. You think you already know. You think you have been reading this book again and again – so what is the point? Then you can go on reading it like a mechanical thing and you can go on thinking a thousand and one other thoughts. Then it is futile. Then it is just boring. Then you will not be rejuvenated by it. You will become dull. (Osho, The Search: Talks on the Ten Bulls of Zen, Rebel Publishing House, 1977, p. 122).

I wonder if the compulsive search for the latest news/messages and for an unending flow of information could be a reflection on the mental level of the everlasting freshness experienced by an enlightened soul. Such a condition re-creates itself anew at every moment, keeping the mind free from the burdens of the past.

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I joined the July 14 initiative started, among others, by Alessandro Gilioli, Enzo di Frenna and Guido Scorza against Alfano’s proposed law which would strongly limit the freedom of the press and the Net. Blogs which join will show only the protest’s logo on their home pages on July 14.

Even though I was enthusiastic about the Net having contributed by publishing the first books on the Internet in Italy, I think the network is no longer an instrument of social and consciousness transformation as much as could have been envisaged around 10 years ago, for many reasons, among them the infinite distractions and the race toward novelties.

Also, I do not believe that freedom is in prevalence in the freedom of words. The silence of the mind goes more in depth and creates a wider freedom. But, as Almaas writes: “There is nothing you can ultimately say, but you have to exhaust all the words.”

Perhaps the secret goal of the Net is to let words rotate as fast as to create – like a windmill – white color as the sum of every color. Words can exhaust themselves only after being expressed in full totality and freedom, not due to a law which would limit their scope and which would bring us not beyond words, but at a previous level.

I wish as well, that more days of silence will be realized, even without the opportunity of a righteous protest.

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Several news sites recently reported that British Airways is asking its staff to work for free up to a month in order to cut the company’s costs. Such news would have been unbelievable just a few years ago. Here in Europe, having a solid trade union tradition, such a proposal would have been mocked as something suitable at most for Japanese people who are willing to sacrifice for their company.

But this is the brave  new world of 2.0 where we are becoming more and more eager to participate and contribute. We are not only viewers anymore, but actors in the society of the spectacle. On the Net, we feed social networks with our “user-generated content” and help companies to advertise their products. “More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate,” according to the State of the Blogosphere 2008.

To feel a sense of belonging and to contribute to our community is an authentic human need which gets exploited by companies. It is easy to obtain: first, real communities have been impoverished by a massified urban living – family members themselves have been isolated by TV, video games and other media, and individuals have been relegated to an indoor life connecting with each other mainly through the Internet.

In such a condition, our sense of belonging can easily slip to social networks, companies and brands which don’t actually care about us, apart from being instruments of promotion and sites-filling.

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Ever since the Internet came into our lives it has been regarded as the medium supposed to stimulate a positive meeting between cultures and to ease the spread of information neglected by the traditional media. While it is true that everybody can set up a blog or a website with a small technical and financial investment and share their writings, music or videos for the whole world, it seems that the big media are even bigger on the Net and that the understanding between cultures didn’t improve much even 15 years after the mass diffusion of the Internet.

If we look at the academic level, the Economist published an article titled “Great minds think (too much) alike” where research by James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, is introduced, whose work has been published in Science. The conclusion of his work says that, “as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them. Moreover, those articles that do get a mention tend to have been recently published themselves. Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.” The long tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 to define the niche markets which the Web can approach, where unique products take an important commercial value.

Evans discovered instead that the great variety of papers available on the Net, far from widening the range of quoted sources, actually gave privilege to the ones already well known and even more to the most recent ones, probably the easiest to find searching in Google.

On the commercial level, New Scientist published the article “Online shopping and the Harry Potter effect” writing that “big sellers have never been bigger… Andrew Bud from the cellphone software company mBlox have analysed a year’s worth of downloads from a well-known internet music store. They found that of the 13 million tracks available, 52,000 – just 0.4 per cent – accounted for 80 per cent of downloads”.

New Scientist explains the phenomenon as, “easy digital replication and efficient communication through cellphones, email and social networking sites encourage fast-moving, fast-changing fads. The result is a homogenisation of tastes that boosts the chances of popular things becoming blockbusters, making the already successful even more successful.”

This has been confirmed experimentally by Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, New York.

Together with his colleagues Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds, he tested the effect of communication and peer approval on the musical tastes of 14,000 teenage volunteers recruited online (Science, vol. 311, p. 854;). A set of 48 songs was made available to all the volunteers, who could download whichever songs they wanted. The researchers split the volunteers into eight groups; in some, group members could see what their peers were downloading, but in others they had no such knowledge. In the socially connected groups, the winner took all: popular songs became more popular, unpopular songs more unpopular. This effect was much less pronounced in the socially isolated groups.

Watts thinks that information overload makes us more dependent on other people’s opinions to find out what we like. Then New Scientist asks, “why, when we have so much information at our fingertips, are we so concerned with what our peers like? Don’t we trust our own judgement?”

In another article, a psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and close-minded. In a psychological test, Wikipedians, as expected, “were more comfortable online than in the real world” but they, surprisingly, scored low even on agreeableness and openness.

During an Italian conference dedicated to music on the Net, one boy asked the speaker, “We can download the complete discography of any artist, but the problem is: What do we like?” An interesting question, which gives the real point of the matter.

Choices are connected with our personality; choices are bridges between our inner view and an external event. We can make the right choices for ourselves only when we can listen to ourselves deep enough to access the essence of our personality and join it to the outer life. But in order to do that we need both a solid personality which we are aware of and, some quiet and empty time to look into ourselves instead of following just external inputs. Both states are quite hard to access in online life.

We tend to believe that information can construct our personality and give us an individuality. We identify ourselves mostly with what we know, with our thoughts and beliefs, in another world with what fills our mind. But those aspects are as fragile and unreal as the financial derivatives market. The ideas and beliefs which fill our minds are essentially the products of our familiar and cultural conditionings, which give the ego the illusion of being “somebody” with its unique peculiarities.

Information, detached from experience, detached from a felt inner view and detached from an ethical background, mostly reinforces our conditionings instead of opening our minds to new areas. Neil Postman, in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p. 63), wrote:

Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves.

The mind’s main job and hobby is to separate, to discriminate, and to judge. It gives us a powerful way to read and act on reality which gave science and technology the strongest roles in our culture. Unless mind is subordinated to a broader (we could say spiritual) awareness, is non-inclusive by nature. In this view it is not surprising to know that online, we tend to stay in our territory with what is already known and accepted by our minds. Our social connections online can surely broaden minds too but mostly, as happens with other media, they promote uniformization.

Actually, we experience the paradox of both uniformization and the explosion of differences; Lee Siegel expressed this paradox as one “must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else” (Against the Machine, New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008, p. 73).

The source of this apparently contradictory phenomenon is in the ego itself, which does need to be recognized and accepted by people but at the same time feel different from anyone else in order to prove its specialness. Commercially, we are presented with millions of choices to let us think we are unique but then people tend to choose what is known or anyway what is known by somebody we want to be connected with and recognized by, much as teenagers are dependent on the peer group’s opinions.

When we are presented with millions of commercial options and we choose one we delude ourselves in thinking we are recognizing ourselves and building a part of our individuality. The market, as the Situationists had already seen in the 1950s, first takes away our real needs of connection and authenticity, then illudes us in giving what we need, but in a pale reflection of the real, making us always thirsty for a ‘real’ which will never come.

The variety expressed on the Web is well developed and important and will expand even more, but it seems that the force toward variety turned back into concentration of sources of information, as Nicholar Carr said in an interview for The Sun magazine.

It was once believed that the Web was essentially centrifugal: that it pushed people away from big, central sources of information to millions of small, independent sources scattered throughout the network. But it turns out that centripetal forces – forces that draw us back to the big power centers – are also strong on the Web. Big sites have big advantages, and they seem to get stronger over time. The Net’s Wild West days are coming to an end. The trend now is more toward the consolidation of traffic and power than toward their diffusion.

Our choices about information can come from our depth if we allow ourselves to sense our very depth. The more we swallow information the less we are able to make real choices. We can’t make real choices because we don’t listen to ourselves; and we don’t listen to ourselves because the capacity of our inner attentional muscles is never exercised and it becomes weak by attending only external inputs mostly of short bits of information with no broad view. When we can’t approach our inner self or when the very habit of looking inside becomes weakened, we can only consign our choices to the mass or perhaps just to the faster website. In this way we identity more with the contents of information poured into our minds and less with our essential qualities.

One of the mantras of the Internet is that there aren’t barriers of social status, religion, country, ideology. This is true of our possibility to access any kind of information on the Net, but the more we identity ourselves with our mind’s contents, the more we erect defenses against extraneous information which would shake our mind’s structures and therefore our very identity. The real broadening of the mind can happen when we don’t identify with our mind’s beliefs and ideas, but with our felt inner qualities which are being supported by the observation of our mind’s processes and by the acceptance of the emptiness of our mind.

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After a series of resistances to Facebook I experimented with the social network in the last few months. The first resistance was about presenting a “self” of mine, the same for all people in my friends’ list. This created some perplexity for me. I like the variety of human beings and have always mixed with people of the most variety: adventurers, hippies, artists, travelers, therapists, entrepreneurs, scholars, rich, poor and creative mixes of those natures. My self, being composed of a mix of different personalities, tends to show different facets of my nature where these can find correspondence. Inevitably, this creates more intimate and personalized relationships but at the same time they are limited by a subset of our personality.

With Facebook and the public profile which widely embraces our personality, I was afraid of not being recognized “for what I am” by some individuals. It reminded me of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the latest novel and a masterpiece of Luigi Pirandello. Basically we are “One,” but for the majority of people we are not “No One,” while in front of the multitude of people who know us, we are “One Hundred Thousand.” We are a different person in the eyes of each person. Without going to the spiritual level where we can say that actually all of us are “nobody” and “everything” at the same time, remaining on the levels of the personality construction and object relationships, Facebook is an interesting experiment.

On the Net we are often anonymous in many spheres: in our Web surfing, in social networks and in forums, we mostly use identities which do not identify us precisely. Facebook is an attempt to reunify the various personalities and to give a center of consciousness to the fragmentation of the online personality. It is an attempt to overcome – even though limited to the digital area – the various object relationships. Facebook can represent an evolution of the adolescent search of one’s own personality, a stage when there are attempts to give ourselves an identity through experimenting with life and people and often hiding behind anonymity.

So, here I am with my “real me” on Facebook, the same in front of everybody, unifying the pieces of my history and therefore the pieces of my psyche. What will it be like, this public “me”? As a lowest common multiple where my relationships and human qualities can be creatively expanded through sharing with friends, or will it be as a highest common factor where only the common qualites will be kept, the ones which most people can accept? It seemed to me sometimes the former at other times the latter.

When in the offline community human relationships are evermore distant and formalized, where almost the whole territory has been turned into a cement jungle, where non-commercial places for meeting are becoming rare, where the time for real meetings itself becomes absorbed more and more by technological gadgets, Facebook has arrived to the rescue for helping us to find again the sense of belonging and to keep in touch in contact with people.

The first thing which struck me was that Facebook proposed to me to update my status writing in the third person: “Ivo…,” which I could have completed with “has gone to the beach,” “has had lunch with friends,” “is writing an article,” etc. We write this way in the perspective of others, to be seen and read. The third person has a double function. From the one hand to present oneself in the third person supports the inner observation. The very fact of presenting oneself from the point of view of others helps the awareness of ourselves. On the other hand, speaking in the third person can feed the ego even further, maybe for the very fact that in speaking of ourselves we are feeding an attention which is not that of inner observation, but that of the ravenous ego to be seen and recognized.

After a couple of months the initial proposal became, “What’s on your mind?” Facebook is giving more importance to the “Twitter-like” functions, stimulating the flow of daily messages almost in real time. The way of meditation is to let the thoughts pass by, not becoming attached to them. After years of working on myself, one of the few things I have learnt is that the mind excretes thoughts continuously, that the vast majority of them are not interesting and most of them do not even belong to us. Most thoughts present themselves in the form of conditionings and repeating others’ words and thoughts, with few variations on the theme. Now that I start to attach less to my thoughts, letting them flow with a certain indifference, here comes Facebook which elevates them to the “news of the day” ranking. Well…

Anyway, I played around a bit with Facebook, wrote some notes, gave links and uploaded photos of my travels. Once I was on a tropical island, taking pictures and thinking of how I would have presented them on Facebook. Instead of living the situation totally, I was thinking of how to picture it and how to present it inside a media, moving away from the direct experience on many levels. Even the mind which interferes is a part of the totality of experience and I accept it with great pleasure, but when it exaggerates, I put it aside in a corner.

I remember when I was a child and when something interesting was happening, sometimes the adults would tell me, “Oh…think of when you’ll tell this to your friends (or at home).” It used to make me mad because it got me out of the flow, whether I was playing or watching a show. For many years I did not take pictures of my trips and in some way if I have started doing it since the last few years, it is also due to the pressure of sharing them through the Internet.

Every time I connect to Facebook I browse the flow of my friends’ updates. There are those who write several notes in a day, those who seldom write, there are funny or serious appeals, a female friend of mine writes, “Something is dying inside….”If she writes it in a public way it is a desire for sharing, but it is strange to see this message running with dozens of other signals mostly ordinary and often banal. I know something about this friend’s life; it wouldn’t be appropriate to reply in public for asking further details but at the same time I would not want to use Facebook as a platform email for sending a personal message. In this manner we enter Facebook for continuing a talk which can happen much more easily through ordinary email. I choose not to send any comment or message in Facebook, reserving myself for communication with her in other ways (by Internet, through IM or email because we live in different nations). I also ask myself if I am avoiding deeper contact, being in my turn taken over by the avalanche of superficiality.

Using Facebook I tend to decrease individual contact. More than communicating I found that I was broadcasting, transmitting to an audience. Almost every day the audience increases, the number of friends expands. The effect is seductive and gratifying for the ego, but it is a different thing to communicate to a public rather than to a single person. With each of them there is a unique story and a unique relationship. Of course, it is possible to send personalized messages by Facebook too but for this purpose a mailer program is better, while the structure of Facebook gives more emphasis to broadcasting. As a mailer I use Eudora, an old software, but still functional and “ecological,” which works even with a slow Internet connection or through a mobile phone connection. Differently, it is almost impossible to open Facebook pages with a connection which is not ADSL to send just a private message.

I have noticed that after about 50 “friends” the flow of messages becomes such that it leads to loss of sense and value. I tend to scroll the messages with the mouse as if they were newspaper items. As when in some countries everybody is hooting on the road, the meaning of the signal gets lost, hearing gets anesthetized and it becomes only a background. McLuhan had noticed how technologies and the media become as much an extension as an amputation of the body/mind’s faculties.

The nature of the mind is such that after some time it erases any interest; through the repetition of the stimulus less attention is given to the same type of input. The mind chases novelties. The same happens to me with the feed of the blog I read. As soon as a blog has been discovered I follow its articles with interest, then tend to look through them quickly. I would not want to “evaporate” my friends’ messages in the same way.

Giving news regarding myself on Facebook makes me become lazier and having an excuse for not contacting people personally. And what about those who aren’t on Facebook? Most of my friends are not on Facebook and sometimes they do not even use the Internet. Since there is a limit to the time which one can dedicate to communications, those inevitably get penalized.

The really important news of my friends, including those who are on Facebook, anyway did not come through Facebook: they reached me by direct contact, on the phone or by email. In any case I’ll play the game of Facebook more, but I could decide to stop at any moment by sending a note to my contacts. Apart from the above-mentioned reason, it would be enough for me not to be connected to a fast Internet line for some time to make me lose the will to wait for minutes for looking through mostly banalities, with all the respect I have for my friends.

Facebook undoubtedly is the best engineered social network site, nevertheless I foresee the fall of its popularity as it has happened with other very popular sites such as Second Life or MySpace. Facebook will be more persistent than the others because it is linked to people we know in real life. But as the mind has constructed the game of Facebook, the mind will dismantle it. The mind loses interest about everything, especially if something remains only on the mental plane. Facebook’s strength consists in being a bridge between the purely mental world and the world of real relationships. In this reciprocal exchange between the virtual and the real on one hand some virtual meetings can be “real-ized” but on the other hand real people can be “virtualized,” reducing them in our psyche to a small icon and a flow of bytes which scroll on the screen. Similarly, various appeals and different causes risk counting in the real world as much as a discussion between prisoners during the air hour.

All of what I have written was without considering the problems connected to privacy – which would be an alarming separate chapter.

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