I will say of a common saying which I really want to get rid of. By the way, I do not deny that this is the reason why I write these gleanings with pleasure, and not only to give the reader provocations which are really far from being accompanied by any sense of truth. A sort of reset, in short, or perhaps an act which allows me to free myself. Furthermore we could stress that common sense can only rarely help us to understanding something.
Here then is the announced common sentence: digital feeds on and in globalization. Furthermore, globalization would be a misfortune because it would make everything equal, and consequently would kill differences and therefore identities.
All this is bound to be a legitimate argument. But there are some observations to underline. Internet is undoubtedly one of the dominant and extremely effective factors of digital. It is also a very powerful factor of globalization. However, the information it spreads (messages, communications, arguments, images, drawings, videos, sounds, music, algorithms, etc.) are really characterized by difference, by infinite small and large differences, be they significant and insignificant. Like globalization, the Internet is a world of worlds.
But wasn’t it the industrial mode of production that badly needed to process information? And you could possibly succeed in it thanks to one of your get own motivations. Just remember Henry Ford’s motto “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” (Each customer can get a machine of any color he wants, as long as it is black). The Ford T to which we are referring couldn’t be but black, as that paint color at the time dried faster than the others.
Another example is the way industrial production spread the Coca Cola that everyone drinks and that is the same everywhere.
Moreover, Digital does not impose any standards even though it can produce it. What it can do is to get rid of the machinery.- even if it can do other things. We surely know that after all our computer is a somehow evolved machine and that the digital mode of production is nothing more than a subsequent phase of the industrial climate of production and its revolutionary nature.
However, let us try to think that what happens in the computer is closer to what happens in our brain when we make a decision than to what happens in our car when a piston moves the wheels of our car. Of course, there is still something similar between the two procedures, but digital has simply given more power to our brain rather than to the machine. So, we can give ourselves an extraordinary gift we can give ourselves jus by questioning life instead of machines. A dangerous gift, it is just by doing this that can deal with what we could be in the future and no longer what we have been.
