A LITTLE SITE

by Alfredo Anania
(passages)

Epoch-making events sometimes happen slowly in silence and sometimes happen in a fiery with a great stir. The modern era, the new millennium, and U-turns (because of human short-sightedness, only in a small way will we be able to have the knowledge of them) propose vertiginous "time-space dimensions". To consider how much this can be true, it is enough to witness a few specific clichés which are by now becoming rampant in the new economy: "Everything has to happen right now!" "You must be intolerant and impatient of delay!" "You have courage; go for it and don't stop until you get there!" "The long term is three months away!"… And so on! Today it is emergeing a heated debate about the consequences of world "globalisation": whether it promotes equality among all men and the opportunity to enrich them (not only from an economic standpoint) or that it stops everything for the benefit of some "strange dictatorship" of the neo-capitalism. Each psychoanalyst knows well that it is never the human who presents only one truth. The individual and the group, so as in Bifront Ianus, holds within both opposing parts. War and peace, good and evil, creativity and destructiveness, love and hate, are all opposite faces of the same coin. Equally can also be said about all human relations: objects and works can result in good or bad in regards to its employment and the purposes. A few years ago, when I was more dubious about the Internet (because everyday it absorbs so much time, induces the individual to cut himself off, and moreover easily makes one lose the all above, especially young people, like someone when immersed in reading), a dear friend who is exceedingly cultured and intelligent made me consider that just as what was formerly the creation of newspapers, the Internet is now considered a breakthrough with effects similar to that of a great revolution. Like all great innovations it awakens anxiety and causes opposition.

The Internet is the new "magic island": is necessary to be attracted, to land on and later to try to run away from it. The foremost transformation provoked by the Internet is, in my view, not so much the nullification of time as related to distance (from A to B, from B to C etc.) as is the breaking-down of the "place-value", that has meaningfulness in geographic settlement (A, B, C etc.). Here "value" contains various meanings such as relevance, importance, power etc. In the "Internet-world", in the network, both A and B and C have equality. Allow me to clarify. Before now the place could be prominent: to belong, to live and to work in a city (especially in a rich and strong nation). It gave prestige. It increased possibilities and it conferred credit. For example, living in London was not the same as living in Tripoli. Living in a regional capital was not the same as living in a little Mediterranean archipelago. Today all that is meaningless or will soon disappear quickly. The "Internet" counts the one that you are, the one that you offer and your ability to intercommunicate. In the Internet-world there are value contents. The "dominion" of a site is not a geographic question but is one, which is functional as that of appeal and can generate as such the capacity to diffuse what is therefore contained within and to maintain them plausibly also from an ethical point of view. Moreover, excluding the moment of its creation, the site is completely untied to a place. It is immediately, almost "divine". In the "net" is to say in all places and nowhere in particular at the same time. All over the place accompanies you, therefore, you are its conductor and can, in a dynamic way, operate in and through it wherever you go. Still more, anyone from every place, can gain access to it. Is this not revolutionary!

The large diffusion of group-analysis is in part due to various theoretical elaborations, thus allowing a better comprehension regarding human interrelationships and focusing on a few fundamentals that find remarkable parallelisms in the "Internet-philosophy". I refer above all to the full evaluation of the individual-centrality (plexus) as the nodal point of a social-relational net, of which points to the interconnection of the dense web that compose it. In the group-circle each individual, in as much as he occupies an equal distant seat, has the same personal values with reference to the other members. Belonging to a person who is speaking here and now, inside the therapeutic group the summit is deeply dynamic. It is mobile and functional, and therefore, is without stratified leadership. It easy to extend the vision from the therapeutic group to the psychosocial net of which today's Internet is the global portal. It is the Internet that has acquired the role-place of the common human matrix where we can find all connections ("link"). It is from this revolution of daily life generated by the Internet that will create a new way to conceive the "polis" and "politics". Already today it is happening. At least in Europe, there is a deeper and deeper split, between the healthy and hard-working part of society (who together make up a good number of managers and entrepreneurs; who are able to take wealth and welfare to the community and who constitute the silent majority of citizens) are illustrating an exodus away from mass bungling than that of the politico (those wheeler-dealers, covered by political parties) who now stay regularly at the top of various public institutions emptying them of their effectiveness and importance. It isn't surprising that the "I don't vote party" is multiplying itself excessively. This is also an effective choice by a member to assert himself, as each psychoanalyst well knows, that in certain moments of group life, it can be a way to come back to the present and can also represent a way of behaving!