New Technologies: from Risk to Resources for the Weakest Participants

The new techno-logical culture is mutating the basic language, orienting it more and more to speed, interaction, and sharing. As often happens, due also to the speed of actual mutations, this process does not combine itself with a consciousness: it is neither of the thought type, which new languages convey, nor of the knowledge type, to which it contributes to the creation. The logical type cognitive approach, linear sequential, structured, argumentative and abstract, is progressively being replaced by reticular logics, linked with hypertext codes. This deep comprehension difficulty affects the subjects at risk of socio/cultural marginalisation or, in a broader sense, the weakest ones, above all. To a major availability, the response is a substantial difficulty for choosing information, on being oriented in magno-cell stimuli, on governing the multimedia world with its suggestions. Briefly, a simple informatics alphabetisation is not enough to build digital competence on which an effective knowledge can be rooted. Our daily life is dominated by techniques, times and spaces. Our rationality follows ‘technical’ (A. Broers, 2009) logic more and more. Technology is introducing epochal changes – in personal relationships, in social dynamics, in both identity construction processes and in the thought elaboration mechanisms. The consequence is that it has contributed to forging anthropology, and therefore our young people’s mentality on operative effectiveness (R. Queraltò, 2008). The thing has evident consequences for the cognitive styles and the knowledge construction processes.