According to E. Stepanova «…while effective as a grassroots tool to bring down an authoritarian regime, social media-based network activism may not be best suited for political competition at the stage of “post-revolutionary” state-building, governance reform, and institutionalized politics in general (…)». Though this could be considered realistic in relation to the prevalent use of social media for purposes of protest made during the so-called "Arab Spring", the paper here proposed is aimed to outline a use of net-based communication not as an environment for political competition, but for collective imagination of policies, with particular reference to urban and territorial policies. These latter in turn meant not as a prerogative of governments, but as a result emerging from social and environmental interaction. The philosophical assumptions of such a possibility have clearly been indicated by P. Lévy in the work of some Muslim teosophists of the X-XIII century (al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, Maimonides), or rather in the overthrow of their transcendent conceptions towards a total immanence of religion and politics. Immanence which in particular implies: i) the replacement of the celestial world with virtual worlds; ii) the passage from the figure of the prophet to that one of the scout of those worlds; iii) the transition from the paradigm of control to that one of self-organization; iv) the construction of technical devices, social and semiotic, involving an overrun of the media communication space; v) the invention of languages able to let the intelligible pass through the sensible, that is, the acknowledgment that every thought, even the most abstract, involves the support of an image. Based on these assumptions, the paper addresses in particular some issues, examples and perspectives related to the construction of virtual environments online for the collective imagination and the implementation of appropriate responses to the challenges, though differentiated, that cities and territories in Europe, in the Mediterranean and in the World must face together.
From protest to collective imagination
DE BONIS, Luciano
2013-01-01
Abstract
According to E. Stepanova «…while effective as a grassroots tool to bring down an authoritarian regime, social media-based network activism may not be best suited for political competition at the stage of “post-revolutionary” state-building, governance reform, and institutionalized politics in general (…)». Though this could be considered realistic in relation to the prevalent use of social media for purposes of protest made during the so-called "Arab Spring", the paper here proposed is aimed to outline a use of net-based communication not as an environment for political competition, but for collective imagination of policies, with particular reference to urban and territorial policies. These latter in turn meant not as a prerogative of governments, but as a result emerging from social and environmental interaction. The philosophical assumptions of such a possibility have clearly been indicated by P. Lévy in the work of some Muslim teosophists of the X-XIII century (al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, Maimonides), or rather in the overthrow of their transcendent conceptions towards a total immanence of religion and politics. Immanence which in particular implies: i) the replacement of the celestial world with virtual worlds; ii) the passage from the figure of the prophet to that one of the scout of those worlds; iii) the transition from the paradigm of control to that one of self-organization; iv) the construction of technical devices, social and semiotic, involving an overrun of the media communication space; v) the invention of languages able to let the intelligible pass through the sensible, that is, the acknowledgment that every thought, even the most abstract, involves the support of an image. Based on these assumptions, the paper addresses in particular some issues, examples and perspectives related to the construction of virtual environments online for the collective imagination and the implementation of appropriate responses to the challenges, though differentiated, that cities and territories in Europe, in the Mediterranean and in the World must face together.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
