To the infosphere

Author: Arantxa Serantes (*)

An immaterial world. A framework of information ethics in which a multiplicity of entities that coexist and interact use information as a resource and, to a lesser extent, digital literacy as a means. The semantic environment has changed. We are informs in the words of prof. Luciano Floridi . Information organizations interconnected or integrated by a device: the mobile. It is the main source of modeling of the mind because it is a vital communicative instrument that intervenes and faces the world of data, thus designing an architecture whose models and representations are in the making, without a defined ethic. Let’s say it’s a constructivist view of information.

There is no prevention against possible corruption and exhaustion as well as the reduction in quality, content and value of the information, because it is not even raised in a coherent way, which collides with fundamental freedoms and rights, since the perspective anthropocentric has been abandoned. There is no interest in informing people, so that they understand the process in a natural and progressive way. There is prior conditioning to teach us to think according to a programmatic model in order to avoid the critical spirit.

Only an intergenerational gap, with a certain critical sense and perspective, whose accessibility with respect to the digital field is still in the making, contemplates this revolution from a pragmatic skepticism that values the immediacy of information channels, being aware of its bias.

The infosphere as such is an ecosystem in which the human / artificial border is blurred. It will be difficult to understand who is behind it, when we request information or when we require a certain product and/or service, because the AI trainning is being subjected will make it much more effective, although it will not be exempt from errors, of which as users, we won’t really be aware because the parameters will be predefined.

It seems incredible that fifty years have passed since the creation of Arpanet (the Internet´s grandmother) and that such an unexpected feat was commemorated quite recently. Has anything changed since then? Formally, it has been vital, but there is an oligopoly behind it that does not allow what is essential to proliferate.

Internet is in the midst of a chaotic transition. There is no security plan, universal access, balance between the power of companies and that of users. Where is the teleology of the infosphere then?

How the search patterns will be organized and selected, the results obtained, the hierarchies, the interactions that are often redirected or intercepted that distance us from true communicative acts, we are already living it and in many cases, unworthy, because we prefer the haste reductionism.

(*) Digital Humanist and Phd. from USC

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