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WINDOWS VISTA,
MORE DOMINION OVER REAL
Txt: Sandro Fossemò
We must be careful with using Windows software univocally. Microsoft has not only reached the monopoly of the market, but it has even realised, in a certain way, a particular IT platform suitable for a media planning of Reality.
The application which manages data manipulation is the IT mean through which some news can easily enter houses together with television, as in the case of Orwell’s Big Brother. This is the risk. If an operative system doesn’t allow you to manage freely information, without being spied on and being obliged to follow particular and complex technical procedures, the risk is to be subject to a certain type of administration which wants to use the IT mean to close a certain type of communication open and subjective, in such a way as to oblige those who surf the web or use IT programs to think according to flat schemes for thought.
It is as if it existed a big univocal business mentality organising operatively everything and everybody. The Windows system, in its evolution up to the recent Vista , simplifies multimedia rendering it more operative and direct to public participation but within a more defined communicative context where information, after being diffused and used, is pre-built by the establishment according to operative criteria merely manipulative.
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Web messages are, in a few words, organised in an ideal and capillary way to integrate and widespread the cultural conditioning of the system. Renato Pestriniero ‘s expectations (15 years ago) now seem prophetic: “And during a short period of time, man will become mass to modify by himself a reality he isn’t interested in as it appears to be more and more alien to him: when the convergence between video technologies will take place, (TV-laser discs) and IT technologies (interactive computer-software) it will be enough for him to use the mouse to use, separate and enlarge, change of position and repeat each photogram. The action will be decided by the mass man in a farce of free will, and so rigged shots will originate thousands of solutions chosen directly by the user.
If interactive television becomes able to interface totally with computers through suitable software such as Windows, then the entire universe linked to digital communication is intended for programming and spying on our choices and opinions, even without our approval. We can’t act completely freely if we are not able to originate an autonomous and creative administration of data and communication. The risk is to believe we can communicate in Internet freely, with total choice or sharing of multimedia information, when instead we are just trapped by a perfectly homologated and closed web.
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This kind of control happens because we are living in a society where illegitimate realities are built up by media, governments, multinationals, religious groups and there are electronic devices transmitting those pseudo-worlds directly in the mind of the reader, spectator, listener ( Philip K. Dick ) The most of the times we select, quite involuntarily or mechanically, a field of messages mass media widespread or advertise as the most important. f we choose passively this bunch of data, we tend to adjust our perception of reality to an external reality built up artificially by means of communication without being aware indeed.
Informatisation of society has made it possible the total programming of human existence, which was converted on a global scale in a “digital life”, perfectly integrated within the standardized thought. Debord affirms that it is no longer possible for people to express a personal idea on the existing reality due to the continuous and suffocating information given by media which don’t leave space to the birth of the critical thought of the individual. The post Frankfurter J. Habermas has criticized the modern political participation of masses, purely illusory in the present democratic system which is structured by mass media in such a way as to promote and produce political choices predefined, where public opinion built on power turns out to be suitable to the private sphere.
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The media conditioning becomes absolute when reality does not come from needs or personal experiences but from a perception organised simultaneously by media. So, the world is not what we feel or see individually, but it is exactly what the others want us to see or feel as if it was our, giving us the illusion to be well informed about everything thanks to the “perfection” of digital information. Elaborations and messaging are intended for a critical context of real, but they rather become a question of real substitution through signs of real, that is to say an operation of cancellation of each real process through his operational double ( Baudrillard ).
It is about having to manage passively a big news flux, wanted by consumers, but structurally defined according to market strategies of big economic groups, which aims at rendering human communication a mean perfectly suitable for promoting a consumption relationship with the world. Communication and information technology manage to hide the absence of a true democratic relation with the system through instantaneous and branched propagation of a simulated democracy and commercially organised in a spectacular sense, where it becomes very difficult to diffuse and disguise mass perception .
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So, if communication is get through consumption diffusion inherent to the advertisement of human society, the perception of reality becomes uniform unidimensionally to the mass of data which are filtrated and manipulated by power, through programs suitable for making this kind of elaboration.
