In 'Il sex appeal dei corpi digitali' Luca Poma warns and reminds us that we all have a digital body, in constant relationship with our physical body. Our digital 'double' influences us and changes the way we are, the way we think, the way we live.
The screen lights up, we open the laptop, we pick up the phone. And immediately we potentially surrender a part of ourselves to a boundless world that takes possession of us. This is the starting thesis of the "digital body", which Luca Poma – journalist, writer, the driving force behind Creatori di Futuro and a compelling communicator on contentious issues – dissects in his book Il sex appeal dei corpi digitali, just published by Franco Angeli.
Our digital body… is the digitalised reconstruction of all the information we produce through our digital interactions of any kind, constantly updated and stored across a myriad of different platforms, which "greedily" and bulimically absorb all the data that belongs to us, but above all "draw" the boundaries of who we are.
Our digital body can become a commodity to be exploited without our knowledge. But, as with every revolution, the picture is not irredeemably bleak. The use of tools such as social networks, blogs and all digital media has tangible effects on our mood, certainly, and therefore on our physiology.
Each person's digital body — that is, the broadest possible representation of who we are, from biometric data to our reputation — has its own substance, its own depth, and is even capable of predicting our movements. Roby Horning, editor of New Inquiry, goes so far as to assert that it is pleasurable, for many users, "to become a product themselves".
If social media turns us into products, it paradoxically helps us appreciate ourselves, to feel desirable. We are aided in this by a sort of generals in this army of digital bodies — namely, the major holders of our information (no conspiracy, just profit strategies): e-commerce giants, email providers, social media. But also pornographic websites: 88 per cent of adult sites — according to an investigation by Motherboard, the Vice channel specialising in high technology — store users' information, leaving trails that can be retraced by hackers and which therefore, along with our privacy, put our real lives at risk.
There are essentially three directions on which Poma focuses his attention.
One: we have a love-hate relationship, simultaneously, with the mediators of our virtual desires and with the communities to which we belong.
Two: we have a desire for transformation, as demonstrated by the fact that 41 per cent of Tinder users are married or in a steady relationship.
Three: we have no critical counterpoint. Immersed as we are in information, we find what satisfies us and search no further, because there is no tool to sow doubt.
Some empirical tests suggest that newsfeeds do nothing but intensify the delivery of content aligned with the convictions the user has expressed through "likes", so the user lives immersed in the depths of their illusions, which Poma describes as "a gelatinous and dark sea". Inside their diving suit, the user feels at home. Both Facebook and Google are capable of reading our mood. Are they capable of manipulating it? According to the author, yes. The system:
…feeds its victims to make them feel a little like protagonists, while proceeding to construct the scaffolding of its house of alienations from the real world, only to then "rape" our digital body by surprise, in an act of violence directed towards the pleasure of just one of the parties involved.
The relational model also applies to the acts of self-narration each of us performs in the digital world which, by influencing others, reverberates back upon us. Poma even attempts to use the imagery of insemination, of fertilisation, when speaking of the dark networks hidden in the depths of the internet.
The digital body has seductive powers — for example, in a social experiment Emanuele Macaluso created a fictitious musician who amassed almost five thousand "likes" in two months, non-existent in real life. Neez Nuts received between 7 and 9 per cent of the vote in the American primaries between Iowa and North Carolina, yet was a politician invented by a fifteen-year-old high school student. Beyoncé — or at least her digital body — garners approval in abundance, has tens of millions of followers yet tweets only 8 times a year. And we have not yet transgressed the bounds of decency and propriety.
As many analysts have noted, the progressive changes to social media algorithms push users to pay ever more in order to ensure their messages — and what they want — circulate satisfactorily. A vicious circle that resembles that of addiction, and here too a parallel with bodily physiology can be detected. Luca Poma also points out that digital bodies "prostitute themselves" with increasing frequency, that we risk being groomed by artificial intelligence "beneath the flyovers of the digital motorways", and that our digital body can end up slowly cannibalising our reality.
"Each of us has our own relationship with the digital world, not necessarily a compulsive one," concludes Luca Poma, wondering whether this is not adolescent behaviour, given that Facebook has only existed for ten years.
In provocatively using terms such as "fertilisation", "violence", "rape", "prostitution" and "cannibalism", my intention was to shake the attention of the community of experts, academics and communications professionals, to prompt them to reflect on the rules that researchers, communicators and public relations practitioners will need to develop, learn, apply and make habitual in order to govern these new, passionate, exciting and at times troubling scenarios: rules so new as to render obsolete any good public relations handbook or treatise on communication techniques.
And he concludes: "As everyone knows, the greatest luxury in the contemporary world is having time and winning space."
Neo is a cross-media publishing project by Franco Angeli that provides, for each book, both an ebook and a conversation platform on which to discuss the themes addressed in the book and stay up to date.
For example, here Luca Poma, in conversation with Enrico Galletti, discusses the sincerity both of one's own comments and of the true intended recipient towards whom a like is genuinely directed.
