All the ongoing events, above all in the domain of technology and technosciences, with particular reference to the universe of digital communication—involve not secondary modifications in the ways of seeing and practising the world. The net, in the light of the new historical conditions which it creates, forces to renew the inter- pretation of several pivotal elements of knowledge that have contributed noticeably to the construction of civilizations, in particular of the Western civilization. Likely, the quality of the questions whose answers gave birth to the fundamental reflections of classical science has to be rethought; for instance, the quality of the questions about the ways of experiencing time, or the ways of conceptualizing space, causal- ity, relationship, balance, evolution, and so forth.
The awareness of the ongoing changes imposes to review also the map of knowl- edge. And it is in relation to those knowledge that a new reflection about the ways of knowing has to evolve.
In that direction, what becomes important is to reconsider the territorial acquisitions of traditionally meant knowledge and, in case of necessity, to integrate them (and/or to reformulate them) with the new realities correlated to technology (to technosci- ence) and to the conditions more or less immediately visible that it poses. This means to assign new and demanding commissions to an epistemology of technology, as a sort of vedette, seen as a necessary element of reflection about nature, meanings and senses of technology itself and about its ways of referring to man. It deals with a moment of knowledge directed towards the elaboration of equipments inter and transdisciplinary, suitable to a first comprehension of the complex properties emerg- ing from those mobile universes that are under construction (Stengers, 1993).
mixing (heteropy), in bricolage, in contamination, in impurity, the conditions of its own construction (Bateson, 1972).
By observing the map of the cultural agencies, it seems that schools and universities, save some significant and isolated instances, have difficulty in replacing themselves in their historical position of a roundabout, because they are not able to set up new qualities for a dialogue with the nodal points which connote senses of direction often trespassing the settled linearity. The new roundabout junctions, in fact, find their reason in the loss of that immobility which made them work as the Benthamian controller eye; that is as mechanisms prepared to conform a priori the flows and to direct them towards the “right” direction to take. Now and in prospect, they can play again a primary social and cultural role only in acquiring mobility, in knowing how to move within worlds more and more characterized by the tangle of differences, in being able to indicate connections also with other places of nontraditional learning and indifferent to geopolitical frontiers, in knowing how to be bound to the singular cognitive histories, peculiar to the individual, so as to open him/her to a plurality of possibles. And above all, it is for them the difficult task to know how to research the most appropriate connections to create relational plots among individuals bearers of cognitive experiences, the most varied, detached, and dissimilar, whose sources are constitutive of the complexity that characterizes the mediasphere.
Educational institutions are called into question not about their greater or lesser ability to transfer contents, but whether transference of contents may still be part of their primary tasks, competing with other numerous issues, perhaps even more reliable than them in the process of communication and monitoring of the contents themselves (Bocchi & Ceruti, 2004).
If the work of internal revision that educational institutions make is still based on the cadence “step by step,” on the check of updating skills, exclusively ruled by the cumulative principle, then a serious misunderstanding is shown. It cannot be seen how the strategic pivot of the educational project may reside in the capability of elaborating a plurality of methodologies and heuristics necessary to avoid the trans and overhistorical immobilism of a one method. The same that, by corroborating the timelessness, prevents from constructing, time after time, the most suitable paths, that is the true guidance object of reflection. The construction of the paths is, actually, the domain where most of the didactic virtues, related to the educational processes, come into play.
Until some decades ago, the existence of an inviolable order, of an order that gov- erned definitively the construction of maps (also cognitive maps) according to a pervasive thought which assigned “every thing in its place,” could be still taught. But today there is no longer the possibility of reserving places to meet things, since they have become mobile, endowed with a morphological and topological inconstancy that often collocates them into temporary places, exactly because their possibilities of life reside in that relational activity, by its nature always dynamical, that they
establish with galaxies of other things. So, a movement that approaches the itiner- ant process of doing by doing becomes pre-eminent, a process not compressible in the exact execution of an a priori thought project, which shows the possibility of achieving a fruitful path through the ability to play strategically with the bonds that the way will present.
Such a condition singles out a proximity with the artistic doing: when one says “the pen leads the writer,” or “the paintbrush leads the painter,” it means it becomes necessary to learn to properly consider (“in perceptively listening” and in learn- ing to take that Heideggerian “back step” which makes one safe from arriving at standing too over things) those “suggestions” that, from time to time, come from a movement in the contingency; the same ones that, by often disproving the metrical short cuts of the modern, are able to show the briefest route to reach a goal, as a result of a sensible way and not as a result of a forced one.
The contingency, with its pervasive breaking-in, is traceable not only in the com- plex, unpredictable, and never totally explainable routes of the artistical doing. A new awareness is increasingly focusing that its presence is necessary to avoid that taking a step is not taking any step; but it deals with a step that, by learning to play with the accidents of the route, produces generative occasions of knowledge. We are moving in the contingency, and—above all for some decades—are being able to construct more and more sensitive artefacts, that make the contingency a condi- tion of their knowing how to self-organize themselves, of their learning to answer appropriately little by little (Morin, 1999a, 1999b).
If the internal reflection has not yet led the educational issues to co-evolve with significant social practises and interests, it is possible that practises and interests, with their intransigent being tentacular, may turn to elsewhere by ignoring tradi- tional educational institutions, or may force them to leave the conditions of isolation where they lie, to the point to draw them to that itinerary they have not yet been able to accomplish all by themselves. Although we have to move in the direction of social interests, we must not omit, however, that the educational itinerary cannot be planned by them, because it would run the risk of finding itself serving particular interests. Thence, school and university may work only by continually negotiating a degree of autonomy that allows them to find a difficult and never definitively reached critical distance; that is, a necessary position to feel safe from attempts of exploitation and to feel authorized to identify the most reliable paths, able to fulfil the tasks the polis refers to them, in view of its knowing how to get in the emerging cognitive dimensions.
In any case, a problematic consideration is necessary since, as already mentioned above, it is not understood that the transmission of contents may still form part of the primary tasks of educational institutions, or that it is what is most expected by them however (Bruner, 1977). By carrying out this activity for historical reasons and for long, they could enjoy a sort of delegation temporally unlimited and exclusive; but
today, in front of changed conditions, the knowledge level invites to choose among several and diversified offers originated by several and diversified sources, in the first place by digital media sources. And it is not certain that schools and universities have qualitatively got the best proposals or the most winning channels; not only:
it is neither certain that the cognitive experiences planned by institutions are the most fruitful, since they inexhaustibly reconfirm semiotic maps that, in terms of discipline, are functional to views of the world which several beneficiaries hardly recognize.
It is not possible to ignore that the youngest generations are at least partially “emi- grating” in an interconnected world, made of and by a plurality of voices, images, sounds, and writings, of and by a plurality of voices-images-sounds-writings, able to put into shape not predictable cognitive processes. The debate centres on the greater or lesser pervasiveness and on the greater or lesser transformative capabili- ties, correlated to technological changes of media and tools that process information (Gardner, 1999). The debate is still open but it seems undeniable that a recursive relationship is being established among the outcomes of the new media and the changes about the ways of knowing, that are deeply connected (Turkle, 1995). By practice, this risks conducting to an actual distance. On the one hand, a miscella- neous panorama of views of the world and of constructions of worlds irreducible to the only unity; on the other hand, the difficulty in understanding and taking part to these new issues by educational institutions, still intent on garrisoning definite territorialities which make them unable to answer qualitatively and adequately the emerging questions.
Once more, the misunderstanding of talking about media literacy and its use is to solve the whole in a function only interested in contents and that concerns the technological use of the machine. Even though endless checking confirms that young people seem to show a surprising familiarity in approaching autonomously technologies of this nature, the didactic activity of training to their use is proving to be certainly important, but scarcely productive of knowledge if it is not tied to questions concerning the incidence of the new media on cognitive processes, on those of symbolization, individual and collective, and on the co-evolutive ones.
Substantially, it is not possible to underestimate the risk of being taken prisoner by idealizations that lead to aphasia, to that real-like, privative condition prophetically narrated by Swift in the geometrized existence led on the island of Laputa. Actu- ally, if the learning of the technique is a necessary condition, the literacy directed to reflect on the technique, in particular, on the ways of expression used by media technologies, lies as an unavoidable condition in order to be subjects of practices and not subjected to practices.
Anyway, the two moments do not oppose each other, but they are in a dialogic condition: each of them dynamically performs a recursive role of a very influential part, constitutive of the surroundings where the other finds stimuli to live and op-
erate. Their relationship cannot be reduced to the technical moment related to the artefact functioning, but it takes shape in a relational dimension for the technique of producing knowledge.
The ship—great technological product, the most relevant of the ancient world, whose function is today applied with metaphorical pertinence in relation to Web navigation, that is net surfing—is of course a container of the navigator (the netsurfer), but at the same time it is contained by the latter, in the sense that it is navigated by him;
but the self-organizational play requires that the navigator, to be able of navigating (by) the ship, must need in his turn to be contained by the ship itself... Freedom of movement implies awareness of living, at least partially, in a necessary imprisonment.
No person can be so unwise as to define himself external with respect to his own language; analogously, none can be so inexperienced as to consider himself external with respect to the technique he resorts to. It is certain that, not to be acted by those practices, it becomes necessary to garrison their confines, to dislocate oneself on those limits which allow to find oneself not confined within them (Longo, 2001).
The situation that is possible to identify, even in its own constitutive but faded con- tours, may find a first moment of knowledge by looking over the passage afoot from constant and preoriented maps to inconstant ones that, in order to give directions, demand the art to be placed according to cardinal points differently orienting and located if need be. Such a transition entails a continuous work of conceptualization and reconceptualization, of categorization and recategorization, so that it is pos- sible to establish a constant tension between the partiality of a point of observation and the awareness that numerous and otherwise prepared paradigms have to be put close, so as to let their reformulation open.
From a cognitive point of view, talking about telematic nets, about the big nets like Internet, means rightly talking about transits, virtual frontiers to cross, were they even those connected to the less promising link. Actually, the net derides the rigidity of borders pertaining to disciplines or geopolitics, or orders of institutional organiza- tions such as school and university. The static nature of liminal definiteness is less and less credible about its capability to produce and spread knowledge; it tends to close ways by anachronistically hindering those paths which let minds domicile at always new and different territories (Tagliagambe, 1997). The same that impose on those who enter it to have to adapt according to a mimetic gesture, isomorphous to the one impressing the complex activity of translating, that is a gesture radically constructive. In order to be in relationship with the other, I must assume forms not utterly mine; to translate myself, I need somehow to betray myself.1 This is a transformative betrayal, indispensable to maintain one’s own identitary forms, by a dynamics of having to revise oneself, related to the learning of knowing how to revise oneself. To pass confines, physically or virtually, is not compatible with the gesture of indifference: one always “emigrates” when an interest is present, even if generated as a “simple” curiosity, and in the perspective of constructing a nest, though temporary, but endowed with objectivity, so as to be able to rely on it; and
not less indispensable is to construct a life of relationship that, as such, derives resources if it develops in diversity.
Specific to digital media dimension is the migratory gesture that, for instance, gets underway from the sedentariness of being in front a computer; it deals with being able of constructing communities disengaged as to metrical bounds of proximity and farness, because interested in distances of cognitive nature, measurable with conceptual metrics that refer to plural views of the world; finally, it deals with being able of constructing one’s own nest, that assumes characteristics of objectivity in the cotextual architecture (for example that of MUD). And the fact to be able to enjoy a great mobility that allows the same person to be member of many communities, each constructor of its own peculiar anthropologies, due to a sort of automatism given by being in net, involves that the subject has to translate him/herself to construct him/herself and to be constructed in manifold and different ways, so as to acquire those identitary multiple traits, altogether consonant with the needs of a worldwide community of destiny (Lévy, 1995; Turkle, 1995).
If relationship is the base of all, it cannot be forgotten that the space of relational dimension opens to the space of simulation. And it is a simulation that entails first of all the construction of models of worlds, even structured and narrated counter- factually, and that secondarily only entails pretence or deceit. But if the more and more tumultuous “space” of the immaterial city reflects somehow the impulses and the interactions radically constitutive of the real city, it means that the distance from balance becomes condition of life for both of them. In a direction of sense, it becomes legitimate to join both of them in this enlightening cognitive reflection that Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers propose in the form of rhetorical question, and sounding approximately as follows: “The intensification of social relation- ships that urban life favours […] has not it been a source of waste, pollution and, at the same time, of intellectual, artistical and practical inventions?” (Prigogine &
Stengers, 1988).
Among the tasks of literacy, the primary one consists maybe in teaching to sway on the confines that separate the daily reality from the virtual world, in teaching to live the interface; so as to learn to place oneself between an “inside” and an “outside” in order to trigger the recursiveness that fosters both without gestures discharging the one or the other. A strategic position that, by connecting the constructions operated within the two domains in a relational way, leads to a continual revision of concepts and categories, according to the necessity of a world that can find its own vital paths only in the conditions of a dynamical balance, mentioned above.
The immobility that necessarily hesitates about that always excessive immersion in one universe or in the other, leads to division in order to attribute omnipotence to the one or to the other. And we owe to it a rising commonplace that, by seeing Internet as the oracular space of the totality, of the assured exhaustiveness, of the satisfaction of any question, works for the creation of a fetish that prevents from emancipating.
It is sacrilegious to forget that the one form of totality, visible to man, can come from a donation by a god; by an Efestus that, once forged the shield for Achilles, makes the cosmology known, that lógos which—by establishing nexuses, almost never visible to man, among the constitutive entia of the kósmos—allows the world to exist in the complexity of human and natural, human-natural, relationships.
These years the word reality, always bearer of problematic semantics, is more and more enriching itself with further meanings, correlatively to the aggressiveness that shows in the attempt at annexing newer and newer territories. And it is just its annexationist pretension to oblige it to open a range of meanings whose manifold richness makes its contours faded. This determines that concepts and categories it makes friends to, often live in a fertile asymmetry. A sheer chance of knowledge that finds evidence in the less superimposable drawings the more concerning with different “departments” of a by the way constructed reality.
It is about asymmetries that demand dissonant and somehow interacting interpre- tative ways: the concept of space and the experience of time change meaning and consistency according to the universes where they are collocated (Cooper &Law, 1995; Meyrowitz, 1995). Analogously, the concept of territory finds in the progres- sive living density of the city a progressive condition of spatial narrowness to the individuals who reside there; while it finds in living density of the net the main reason of its own real expansion: the more the users who enter the net, the more its
“territory” spreads out, according to a principle that does not indicate the existence of an a priori given space and awaiting of being filled, but of a space that is built and widened exactly when someone decides to take sides. The space of the net grows with the use of the net itself, in the presence of its attractive capability. An influential datum, because of the multifaceted implications it involves, comes from the widespread sense of deterritorialization brought by the advance of nonplaces constructed with indifference as to space; and the dispelling of spatial differences entails the dispelling of various textures of sense, constructed in time and in the plot of relationships and experiences, singular and plural.
In front of such a condition, the net plays an ambivalent role: it would aim for constructing recognizable sites, bearers of sense, actual places where to offer every person the possibility of finding oneself and the others; but it is continually restrained by its global vocation that prevents it from making a particular mistake, that happy oxymoron of constructing a place in an isotropic space.
The planetary dimension ineluctably exceeds, and if were not it so, the net would take form as a construction unable to perform its own connective task. However, a phenomenon that calls for a sort of dialogic complementarity creeps from within the planetary dimension: the expansion of the net and the advance of the deterri- torialization lead to the emersion of a strong desire of terrenean forms—to resort to a happy image by Massimo Cacciari—the unalienable need of finding roots and emancipated singularities that give sense to new forms of localization into the