oliviero beha

N. 03/2000

Oliviero Beha

Internet: since numbers regarding the net change at the sound speed and so I will risk to be too much imprecise in the time lapse between I write and you will read, I will keep to generalities.

The most Italians are still without computer and so without net navigation, even if just for us as for all Europe, progression is geometric, trailing the States.

Well then, it seems that in America eighty per cent of the crowds of internauts is constituted by who goes on net on shopping.

To buy anything. And to sell, sometimes.

Well then, the marketing aspect is sovereign. From here the Italian idea to run after the stock exchange trading on line, the e-commerce, the electronic commerce, and all items of the system.

A client and consumer scale system.

It's not a case that the “portals”, that are the Internet super sites, the containers, the mother companies etc. are growing, they are multiplying this for. And that also the phenomenal chance for information that has already made run rivers, Mississippi of ink, also electronic, about aspects that would be decisive as for example freedom from censures, creative independence from masters, affordable costs etc. is revealing itself “simply” a much more soup trade driver.

I explain myself: it is not hazardous to think that the Espresso's and Repubblica's “portal”, Kataweb, caters for essentially to offer advertising investments possibilities, naturally inserted in informative contexts. But the cake is so big even there, that nobody gets vexed if, when you go to buy an advertising space in paper, they answer you “yes, but you must do it also via Internet”.
We would be simply Americans' small-scale emulators. Let's make a very humble, Swift-like proposal. Let's stop and think for a moment. Standing that Internet is Internet everywhere, and this is the Copernican sense of reality of the net, we are “not” the Americans, and we won't be yet for a little time, maybe we won't ever at all etc.

By now, one of the sites the most “ cliccati “ (clicked) (I leave this word among quotes so that the common use of the term will make it metabolise without them) is “Barzellette” (Jokes). Yes, you've read well, www.barzellette.it. Inside it some boys tell jokes, they do not sell anything, they are “visited” with surprising, “megabyte” frequency.

I do not think it's a case: let's bypass town shops that are the places the most closer to the sites by the physical reality/virtual reality ratio. The most of us goes window-shopping. In the United States, distances, the use of credit cards, the habit to buy in itself have translated and identified in the same attitude on net. But if Americans “contain” navigators tout court, and that is the same for us, it would be different the net employ we expect, at least for a certain time lapse. Those overseas buy, we visit, we navigate, and we get more and more information.
If it's this way, Internet give us the possibility to talk, to wake up, if it's in a depression sleep, the entire Italian, the one that could maybe be more informed, more culturally stimulated, more politically provoked. Well then, the meet of a civilization of memories, that is missing its memory even more, and a mean that seems to cancel it at all could give at home fruits far more ripe and not only tradable, it could make save time American style intended, to invest it by an Italian style, an European style. So I expect also quality in sites, simplicity in messages, variety of communication having also a marketing appearance but having a gratuitous nature, and conveying the mean by identifying it with the purpose, that of know more.
I expect, or I would like to go toward a consciousness net, a conscience Internet, not always a market and at once, or a town-market, with its complexity involving market without being completely included in market. They say that in the future we must reconsider the homo erectus, not good anymore to define us since the computer could turn us into another thing, into seated men that will atrophy certain muscles while only some will develop.

Well then, if this genetic mutation waits for us, I would like that at least everybody talks about it via Internet, that the computer criticizes (media voice) the computer. It would seem to me indispensable and more human. Or rather, e-Human...

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