Don't be evil

“It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our only motherland.”

Emile Cioran, Confessions and anathemas

With the adoption of new informational technologies on a global scale the

cyberspace has pervasively entered the lives of more than half of world’s

population, with youth at the forefront in adoptions.

The incidence of digital code seems to have no boundaries and to invest

every aspect of our existence by arranging our behaviours and translating our

innermost desires, as well as fears, into data reserves available for indefinite

uses.

Designed during the Cold War as a communications system intended to be

resistant to a possible nuclear disaster, the infrastructure that underlies the

most capillary surveillance system ever existed, could solely collapse due to

a solar storm.

Is it the digital info-sphere a new model of environment hosting our

interactions in a dimension located outside the space-time coordinates?

Or simply the last technological articulation of the linguistic mammal’s

peculiarity, capable from its very beginning to detach from what is current

and to project itself beyond it through language?

Whatever the answers the evidences of our daily lives shows that by giving

us unprecedented operational capabilities, digital technology ended up

reshaping our notion of real and led us to fully inhabit its syntactic structures.

Currently under studies of experts without previous knowledge about them,

the digital natives are those humans that have developed social and

cognitive dynamics fully formed through the use of connected devices since

birth: living in both offline and online world the two dimensions are no longer

separable for them and constitute a single support in which their life is

inscribed.

We never witnessed in history a generation so deeply involved in such

transgeographic network, nowadays the largest in the world, and

consequently the establishment of the first global linguistic community.

With this project, carried on since 2013 and still going on, I aim to explore

the impacts of digital technology on contemporary global youth population

by focusing on its primary activities - such as, learning, entertainment,

sexuality, work, fight and religion - during the first decades of formation of the

so called homo-digitalis.