The Digital Cult

Download or read book The Digital Cult written by Guido Nicolosi and published by Ethics International Press. This book was released on 24-11-07 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Media and memory are linked by an intimate relationship. Every act aimed at fixing, memorizing, or commemorating, requires the mediation of some form of material or immaterial support: walls, objects, languages, technologies, media. This important new book reconstructs the evolution of this inseparable relationship, from cave art to modern digital devices, also investigating its various social implications. The author highlights the possible cognitive, ethical, educational and political risks linked to the onset of a new "religious" cult of digital media. In a society in which the task of processing, accumulating and retrieving information increasingly takes place within the Internet, digital devices, and Artificial Intelligence, the stakes are very high. It is not just a matter of understanding what the risks are of a possible weakening of our ability to remember, and therefore also to know the world, but to understand who or what owns and controls our individual and collective memory. Ultimately, it is about understanding what is happening to our identity. Faced with the disturbing advent of an inexorable "technological theocracy", the author calls for principles and practices of a new "digital secularism". The book was translated from the original Italian by Dr. Emanuele Liotta.