Daily life is now marked by an incessant and frenetic bombardment of information. When the constant flows of information grow large enough they cancel out each other’s meaning, producing an indistinct white noise in the background. How does one beat this mechanism? What changes is it bringing about in mankind? This must be examined in all the different areas of life that are immersed in the information continuum that creates the white noise. A new approach is needed that catches the necessary information, and personal filtering mechanisms must be built.
And sure enough the web has transformed the way we receive information and it has affected many very different sectors. Learning how to benefit from the new opportunities for knowledge is a must. The approach towards products and services too has changed, now subject to the consumer’s real-time sharing and comparing of opinions and experiences with others. Companies, associations and other economic and social groups are in search of a new paradigm and they are changing in order to respond to the ever-growing need to acquire, exchange and even protect information.
To some all this seems to have positively increased the desire for higher quality of life, one that begins, among other things, with ensuring connectivity to those 55% of Italian families who do not have it yet. It is important to also overcome that resistance to change which is an Italian cultural trait as well as the lack of attention to such things.
Broadband connections and the ever more user friendly and intuitive new technologies, and particularly the social networks that create new spaces and ways to exchange information, should instead give all the citizens of the world access to this “stage” – this is the metaphor as well as the symbolism of the location of the conference. All must understand that challenge today comes with an enormous number of comments and opinions that come from around the whole world.
Careful statistical analysis of the situation in Italy shows that there is a better perception of the current crisis here than in the rest of Europe. It is important to note that efforts are being taken to modify the statistic parameters and algorithms that are used to generate the metadata required to better measure and understand contemporary society. Economic life is in search of answers since the increase in shared information affects the relationship between supply and demand; demand changes and adopts whatever is supplied. New ideas must be examined, until the whole world adopts a single form of production. If the production of a t-shirt costs 1 euro and it is sold at 50 euro, the remaining 49 euro are part of this immaterial value system. This opens up all sorts of new implications for those who are in the publishing businesses. An equilibrium is still being sought between off-line and on-line content, between paper and digital content, and in televised content with different forms of intermediation of the advertising spaces.
There have been many announcements of developments in the medical fields, where advanced information technology has been helpful in creating a healthcare system that is closer to the patients and their needs. Then again, these developments have found opposition where transparency is not always guaranteed, such as in Europe where personal medical data belongs to whoever gathers it, such as the hospitals, compared to the US where such data belongs to the patients. Cultural change is needed to empower the citizens. There was also a discussion on urban environments, on how the concepts and construction of space has changed, how these are first negotiated virtually on the web, then visited, and then finally described via the web once again. This discussion mentioned the mismanagement of agricultural spaces, with a negative use of the terrain, while there are entire urban areas of Milan that cumulatively contain almost 900,000 square meters of empty office space. There was one final discussion on the sea of images that we negotiate, and the need to adopt a critical use of one’s gaze. At the end of the proceedings Thomas Crampton, the social media pioneer and expert of international fame who has transferred his entire professional journalistic life online, traced a portrait of these new social media from their technological base all the way to their economic implications, the new mechanisms by which they relate, and their demand and supply.