Time economy
Knowledge needs coordinates - Media Ecology Newsletter #20
«Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary» (Steve Jobs)
The fascination about the space economy is great. But what about the time economy? I know there is not such a thing, but we can invent it.
The space economy concerns the limits of the territory on which the human species lives and expands them beyond the Earth. And from space it returns information, materials, research, technology back to the Earth. The investments needed to achieve these goals are directed to a host of activities that are changing rocketry, the satellite and telecommunications industry, agriculture and mobility, climate science, and research in general.
The economy of time could be about overcoming the limits of the duration of individual human lives to reach an awareness of the plurality of humanity's life spans. The conquest of this dimension of time, would enable humans to devote their lives to goals that are related to the complexity of life dimensions, broadening their perspectives beyond the narrowness of the individual framework to widen their horizons to choices that are important to the planet and to the totality of humans who inhabit it. The investments needed to achieve these goals are directed to a host of activities that could change education, culture, knowledge production, publishing and research in general.
Newstech and risk
NewsTech is the technology that is evolving in the space where there are Twitter, Mastodon, Eu Voice, Eu Video, Wikitribune. The technologies that serve the dissemination of news can be innovated. The platforms that arise from those technologies can be designed in a way that is more or less attentive to the quality of emerging information. The consequence is greater or lesser political, financial, and cultural risk. (Please read this in Italian)
Freedom of speech and politically correctness
Freedom of expression is an essential right that enables the most creative debate around any topic, generating the conditions for continuous and profound cultural evolution. Clearly, the fewer the sources of creative thought, the less one can imagine seeing such cultural evolution. If everyone were, by absurdity, to conform to a single thought, creativity would be drastically reduced and with it the growth of knowledge.
In the United States in a very pronounced way, and in Europe in a less drastic way, a culture is spreading that from a progressive point of view is concerned with emendation of language and debate from any argument that could in any way be considered violent and offensive to anyone. These new linguistic norms are enforced with strong energy. (Please read this in Italian)
Spaces and times they are a-changing
Luciano Floridi in “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”, 2022, notes that the problem of territoriality happens when internet «one realizes that there is a disconnect between the normative space of law, the physical space of geography, and the logical space of digital». Artificial intelligence makes it possible to separate action from intelligence says Floridi. And among the many consequences of this fact is an awareness of the lack of a human project for the digital age.
In order to imagine a project for the digital age, however, it is necessary to situate the digital itself in the right proportions. And in order to find the limits of digitization, it is necessary to define what cannot be digital: the time of human life remains analog. This realization is a chapter of a kind of contemporary wisdom that finds a form in André Wilkens' book “Analog ist das neue bio”, Fischer Verlage.
Media ecology of time and space
In the media ecology, knowledge is organized by two big kinds of systems. Platforms organize knowledge in space. Narratives organize knowledge in time. Platforms organize knowledge in space. Narratives organize knowledge in time.
The complexity of media ecology and the human dynamics therein is simplified and made manageable by relying on platforms and narratives. But these create eco-cultural niches to which humans adapt but which sooner or later must be overcome to allow human culture to evolve.