The cured environments

Gloria Balbás

Hanna Arendt said that  plurality is the mainstay of the political and this , of life in common.That is very easy to say.She lived in life, I live on the network that I do not know if it is so.Revolutions, global trends and movements of opinión”were born “ in the network and have spread virally.Nothing is more false.A recent study by the Pew Internet American Life Project shows that our knowledge comes more and more from “cured environments”, tailor-made network mini worlds  in which we are shut in.There is  a tendency to follow through Twitter, and even participate in forming personalized information environments, enhanced by the increasing use of content aggregators such as Paper-li, Greader or Percolate.

In addition to this “viralization”is not based on the quality of information but in its popularity in our environment. All the digital environment is also analyzed and contextualized to the end.Our sources are based on social or geographic algorithms,geolocatorsor Smart feeds, such as Feedly, which analyze our behaviour to decide what information should reach us.And most serious is that this obsession, as David Armano calls it, perhaps based on safety, is transferring to education where closed virtual classrooms and PLE succeed..Outside the classrooms it is the same, the “great ones ”also strive to give environments far from the “chaos”, for instance Facebook Connect or Google Social Search.The funny thing is that they are environments where we are not only isolated but we are used as free producers.We are no longer users, we are prosumers.Natives who behave like those industrious clients that end up in their home the furniture built in the industrial brothels in Asia. So we act , multiplying, spreading and adapting the perception that we receive.

We have come to such an extent that gurus like Robit Bhargava created figures as the “curator”.An expert who works for companies to remain competitive in the network.He is not a dynamic, like a Community Manager, but a profesional who creates safe professional sites with hyperfiltered relevant information and for the company.

Also, as Dolors Reig explains we should not confuse the membership groups that are associated with the “social desirability” to be on the network with reference groups and what makes our permeability to information.

Then, you gather the fruit of  your prosumer record in slide, in ning or google friend connect and one day the company that offered you a free site closes they keep your content or show you 100 unintelligible ways to recover it but you are left with nothing.Another edge of the “cured environments”.

The less I see the lights of Hanna on my screen, the more I see the shadows of Neo from Matrix.