No normality, nowhere
The “normal world” is shrinking.
<u><em><strong>CAPTION:</strong>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world" target="_blank">Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world (Source: Wikipedia)</a>
</em></u>
Eurozine has a description of the “Seven rules of culture warfare”, and two of those rules match perfectly a couple of things I have said here:
RULE 5: Think globally, tweet locally: the key context is decontextualization.
The key to an intelligent assessment of a given state of affairs used to lie in seeing information in an adequate context. Nowadays, however, there are situations in which the very concept of adequate context falls apart, making even the most well-educated people seem like morons. Information travels across contexts, and it is not clear at all which of them is the adequate one.
This is primarily due to social media that, thanks to its toxic instantness has an immense potential to de- and recontextualize, and if anything like a permanent imprint of postmodern philosophy exists, it is the right that it never explicitly formulated: the horrifying right to one’s own context.
me: Basically, that “Rule 5” describes how and why, again thanks to social media void of slowness, we are going to regret the age when all we had to worry about were everybody’s own “alternative facts”. Senator Moynihan would not be happy:
RULE 1: The shrinking of the “normal world”
“Normality” is becoming politicized - and is, at the same time, disappearing.
One thing is clear, though. The “normal world” is steadily shrinking - and not just because it is a nostalgic construct. If “normality” becomes a weapon that both parties use against one another, it can hardly be shared. If the “normal world”, “nation”, “family”, or the church, for instance, become objects of political struggle, they lose the currency of normalcy that their champions relied on in the first place. And if, on the level of values, we share less and less, we are also capable of producing less and less “normality”.
Me: the “producing less and less normality” part really got me, because it’s true at every level. Because I observed three years ago that “less normality” is just what software does to SEX, and found more evidence of that just a couple of days ago.
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I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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