La rivoluzione digitale e l’evoluzione del contatto sociale

Technology development has always strongly affected the human relationships and ways of interacting. Man invented language to communicate with his neighbors, and the language adapted itself to the needs of technology. From Egyptian hieroglyphics to medieval images, from handwritten text by monks to type documents and printed books, there have been a succession of incredible discoveries and adjustments. The first example is the Morse alphabet introduction, which was created because the transmission protocol allowed the differentiation of only two signals, dot and dash, by light flashes or radio signals. Today the digital revolution allows for a return to symbolism, because it is quicker, and perhaps more expressive. But the digital revolution creates another problem that already glimpsed a few years ago, and has become dramatic today: the information we want to process and transfer is too large to be managed, because its dimension is too large. This paper goes back to the fundamental stages of this evolution, which should proceed along two lines. First of all, all the technology supporting the information management needs substantial improvements, due to huge amount of its dimension, as already stated. On the other side, the way of communication and interaction among the human beings should develop along new lines, so that absorption and cultural management of wider information is allowed. This last point is a fundamental issue, and requires new learning procedures, to be implemented in the schools, starting from the elementary ones, so that also the digital language becomes familiar to the students, i.e., to all of us in the near future.