[ideas] Social impact of infohybrids and effects the mythopoiesis processes in the Occidental Society today

Social impact of infohybrids and effects the mythopoiesis processes in the Occidental Society today

Independent Research Paper, Stigmatization in Media Art and Psychiatry

2020 Madia Ferretti, Luigi Starace

The exchange between biological/neuronal and informational realms lies at the heart of a dense multidisciplinary debate that has unfolded since the last decade of the previous century. The heuristic model of reference has predominantly been associated with dynamics akin to osmotic processes, whereby two compartments are connected and linked by an extended interface/surface for exchange. In light of recent investigations into ICTs, we believe that in the Infosphere they become hybridizable, meaning that a neogenesis occurs through the exchange of segments inherent to one system with another, thus cybernetically creating a hybrid third entity that can sustain itself without regard to the constraints/limitations of the individual biological or informational systems of origin. For example, video game characters, anime, etc., generating avatars not only in playful contexts, or sex dolls equipped with sophisticated artificial intelligences capable of simulating empathic conversations.

We consider infohybrids to be a prominent peculiarity of the ongoing phase of postmodernity, conventionally defined as "post-pandemic". The COVID-19 pandemic, with its heavy and entirely original socio-existential, psychological, health, economic, and cultural repercussions, developed in the neoliberal West, provided the spatiotemporal coordinates to officially christen the entry into the synthesis phase that we have termed "Synthaesthetica", the subject of this study.

"The global infosphere or how information is becoming our ecosystem During the last decade or so, we have become accustomed to conceptualising our life online as a mixture between an evolutionary adaptation of human agents to a digital environment, and a form of post-modern, neo-colonization of the latter by the former. This is probably a mistake. ICTs are as much re-ontologising our world as they are creating new realities. The threshold between here (analogue, carbon-based, off-line) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred, but this is as much to the advantage of the latter as it is of the former. Adapting Horace’s famous phrase, “captive cyberspace is conquering its victor”. The digital is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it.[...].Basically, the increasing digital re-ontologization of artefacts and of whole (social) environments suggests that soon it will be difficult to understand what life was like in predigital times (to someone who was born in 2000 the world will always have been wireless, for example) and, in the near future, the very distinction between online and offline will become blurred and then disappear. To put it dramatically, the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other space. (http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/publications/pdf/alitfioiool.pdf)"

Hybrids make use of multifaceted adaptive capacities, alternatively exploiting the strengths of the biological or the virtual. Simplifying, one can identify broad and fertile panels of cultivation and development with a mode of growth and evolution that is "driven" or accelerated even exponentially. Belonging to a group, the agent's projective identification both on the psychology of the self and on the cognitive processes of the biological hosts of infohybrids, is as innovative as it is continuous with existing contexts, mythic structures, and thought systems, without generating contradiction, as already demonstrated by the multiple, heterogeneous, and wide-ranging reflections on postmodernity and the Anthropocene.

Recent studies have highlighted how complex narratives, especially those of TV series, have been effective in coping strategies during the first year of the pandemic, demonstrating the potential of infohybrids to follow models of development, growth, and self-reproduction that are new and/or partly derived from original systems. What we hypothesize is that infohybrids are syncretic and fluid and that they do not always require the trophism provided by the mainstream media flow; they could also develop a mode of autonomy from it through a switching mechanism, thus integrating into the conscious or unconscious psychic reality of the biological hosts and surviving without constant contact with the mediasphere and ICTs.

In the past, Western thought has elaborated various insights into the various states of proto-information connected to non-cognitive psyche, such as conceptions concerning the collective unconscious, the knowledge grid proposed by W.R.Bion, or studies on the remodulation of perceptual and cognitive processes induced by the theorization of the mediasphere by M. McLuhan.

Starting from what the anthropologist and sociologist Bastide affirmed, a profound scholar of creolization phenomena, for whom "...To this revolution [...] there must correspond a parallel evolution of mythology..." our research work consists of analyzing, within the phenomenon of the cult of TV series, the narrative and semantic modalities, the memes, the potentially or probably mythopoietic cult icons of infohybrids. As coordinates of meaning, myths constitute true vectors in the construction of self-representation and referential value networks, usually essential in understanding transition phases.

The study adopts a complex research methodology that combines field observation, conducted through virtual ethnography within thematic platforms such as Stage 32, visual art, and the use of an anonymously administered semi-structured questionnaire online in the form of SerieQuest#1. 

The collected data will undergo a mixed methods analysis and will be compared with the peculiar characteristics of low-intensity myths, recently proposed by Ortoleva, in order to verify if the metamorphoses bring about a concrete change both at the semiotic and semantic levels. 

                                              

Notes

1 Information and Communication Technologies

2 With the term Infosphere, it means "The semantic space constituted by the totality of documents, agents, and their operations" (L. Floridi. Infosfera, in Internet & New Net Economy, V. di Bari, Il Sole 25-Ore Libri, 2002). In the definition, the Author with the term "documents" intends any type of data, information, and knowledge, coded and implemented in any semiotic format, with "agents" any system capable of interacting with an independent document (for example, a person, an organization, or a software robot on the web, a sophisticated chatbot), with "operations" any type of action, interaction, and transformation that can be performed by an agent and that can be presented in a document.

3 The term emphasizes the emerging characteristics of contemporaneity: synthesis, understood both as the hybridization of contexts and as the reduction to the essential of concepts; aesthetics, understood as hypertrophy of perceptual mode within communicative and relational processes.

4 Is Watching TV Series an Adaptive Coping Strategy During the COVID-19 Pandemic? Insights From an Italian Community Sample, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2021 (Valentina Boursier, Alessandro Musetti, Francesca Gioia, Maèva Flayelle, Joël Billieux, and Adriano Schimment); Supernatural Creatures, Accidents, and War: Young Children’s Television-related Fears and Coping Strategies.(Kristiina Kruuse, Veronika Kalmus)

5 Taken from Meltzer, Mattle Blanco, Imbasciati, Neri et al. Also see The Model of the Mind According to Bion: Notes on Alpha Function, Inversion of the Alpha Function, and Negative Grid. In Bionian Readings. Rome: Borla. Neri C. (2020).

6 Il concetto di médiasphère introdotto da Régis Debray descrive in generale l’ambiente dei media che caratterizza un’epoca.

7 Il Sacro Selvaggio ed. it. (Le sacré sauvage et autres essais, Payot, Paris, 1975) Edizioni Jaca Book, Milano, p. 82 R. Bastide (1979).

8 Disciplina facente parte dei Media Studies e dei Cyberculture Studies inaugurata da Christine Heine per analizzare la Net life e consistente in un'etnografia connettiva e multisituata con un focus di osservazione che include ambienti differenti ma accomunati dal medesimo topic di discussione.

9 Social network americano e un sito di formazione per professionisti creativi che lavorano nel cinema, televisione e teatro.

10 Miti a bassa intensità, 2019, Ortoleva