Abstract
This chapter, which is makes uses of the concepts of text and interpretation, analyses how these two concepts are transformed during the digital age. First of all, the “dangerous” nature of the text is highlighted and how it has been persecuted over the centuries. Then it is shown how, with the advent of the digital age, the text, even if it has multiplied, it has been infinitely weakened to the advantage of interpretation: what is said about a text becomes more important than what the text says. The paratext dominates the text and no longer serves as support to it. It is therefore highlighted how a fourth way of interpreting the text has developed over the years based on paratext, that is, on the opinions that others have of the text. From the moment in which the Self can be considered as a text, the weakening and devaluation of the text with respect to the paratext also leads to a weakening of the Self. And in fact, in the present society there are many clues that make one think of a tendency of the Self to disappear.
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Notes
- 1.
According to a 2013 survey conducted by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a company specializing in incubation projects on companies in training, smartphone owners consult their device about 150 times a day (once every 6 min), spending approximately 177 min a day on the phone, with sessions lasting an average of 1 min and 10 s, dozens and dozens of times a day. Google calls them “micromoments.” In these moments, the person easily has the opportunity to come across advertising, because the promotional messages take into account the compulsiveness in the use of the phone. In this way, commercial suggestions can easily penetrate into people’s habitual behavior (see: http://www.kpcb.com/blog/tag/Internet%20Trends).
- 2.
We think that in 2014, a total of 1800 million photos a day were taken and posted worldwide (whereas in 2011 there were “only” 300 million). (Source: www.usatoday.com).
- 3.
It is not easy to define what a fact is, but we cannot do without facts and the difference between an electric chair and a barber’s chair is an element of shared knowledge that allows us to distinguish two different facts. Facts like the text are the essential condition for exercising our knowledge and for the same possibility of making interpretations.
- 4.
See in this regard the various services of “verification of facts” (debunking, fact checking) that can be found on websites created specifically to unmask fake news (https://hoaxy.iuni.iu.edu).
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Smorti, A. (2020). Narrative Understanding in the Digital Age. In: Telling to Understand. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43161-7_12
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