We gladly publish the abstract of another of ours keynote speaker of June 9: Peter Dominici, professor of Public Communication at theUniversity of Perugia.
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The challenges of hypercomplexity… For an inclusive innovation
«There interconnected society it's a hypercomplex society, in which the treatment and elaboration of information and knowledge have now become the main resources; a type of society in which the exponential growth of opportunities for connection and transmission of information, which constitute fundamental factors of economic and social development, does not yet correspond to a similar increase in communication opportunities, which we understand as social process of sharing knowledge involving equality and reciprocity (inclusion). Technology, social networks and, more generally, the digital revolution, despite having determined a paradigm shift, creating the structural conditions for the interdependence (and efficiency) of systems and organizations and intensifying the immaterial flows between social actors, are still not able to guarantee that the interaction networks created generate relationships, to the end, communicative, i.e. based on symmetrical relationships and real sharing. In other words, the Net creates a new communication ecosystem but, while redefining the space of knowledge, it cannot guarantee, in and of itself, horizontality or more symmetrical relationships. The difference, once again, is in the people and in the uses they make of the technology, beyond the many interests at stake».
Starting from these "strong" assumptions, it is impossible not to notice how lhe challenges of (hyper)complexity are substantially challenges that directly involve educational and training institutions and that closely concern education itself and educational processes, forms of citizenship and inclusion, knowledge and democracy. As reiterated several times over the years, it is necessary rethink education and training to define the social and cultural conditions of an inclusive innovation, Of an innovation that cannot be for the few. Poor quality education, school and education (a concept that should be dissolved) create the structural conditions for an exclusive and unequal society, unable to guarantee even the conditions of equality of starting opportunities. Germs of the "cultural question" and of what I have called the "asymmetric society”, increasingly marked by inequalities and new asymmetries. In this sense, it is necessary to work hard in schools and universities and, at a no less strategic level, on the continuous and systematic training of all the actors involved, aware that the future belongs to those who will be able to mend the rift between the human and the technological (Dominici 1998 and following), of those who will be able to redefine and rethink the complex relationship between natural And artificial; of those who will be able to conjugate (do not separate) knowledge And skills; of those who will be able to combine, more, merge the "two cultures" (humanistic and scientific) both in terms of education and training, and in the definition of professional profiles and skills. Paying attention to the "illusions of hyper-technological civilization" (rationality, efficiency, total control, protection, security, etc.), to the continuous temptations of quick ways, of simple solutions, of roads already traveled and, for this reason, reassuring that often hide only interests economics and power. This is the definition I have proposed in the past: “To innovate means to destabilize”. But it is necessary, first of all, to critically educate and train people to think for themselves, to know how to recognize hyper-complexity, to see "objects" as "systems" (and not vice versa)**. Risks vs. opportunities: always a matter of knowledge and knowledge management (Dominics 1998, 2003). #Citate the Authors
