| Net & Nomadism Youth Culture Skin and New Scenarios Alberto Castelvecchi May 1999  • Intro • Youth Culture Skin... |
The problem is to humanize the main culture we all live in and render it osmotic and receptive to listening. Based on this line of reasoning, we set out to knock down some of the barriers between essay and fiction products: at Castelvecchi there are no rigid categories of publications as with other publishing houses; we have what could be called a semi-universal approach expressed in every Castelvecchi book. To us, product differentiation was less important the affirmation of a "concept".
The media-related fiction in circulation between 1993 and 1995 dealt with just three subjects, virtual reality, virtual reality and, once again, virtual reality. In the futuristic scenarios we were treated to, the body disappears. A new type of technological physical being emerges (a sort of human machine). The body is eliminated in order to make way for a purely mental relationship with our fellow creatures based on a highly rarefied on-line writing, a form of instant digital communication based on a written language which, quite different from all the other written languages developed by mankind, leaves no trace because it’s based on a system of instant communication whereby I write and you see the message 5 seconds later and 6 seconds later you have already forgotten it. This is the vision of a civilization that writes a great deal, but, as the ancient poets said, on water. We have all experienced the fear of losing all physical points of reference and support. Where will I set the glass, who will I touch if everything is filtered through a keyboard in which I see nothing but virtual silhouettes? In this case, as well, the more this vision of the future continued to be insisted upon, the more we at Castelvecchi continued to concentrate our vision on kids who were becoming increasingly corporeal, increasingly elastic, less and less orderly in their clothing, which was less snug fitting, much roomier. They seemed to be increasingly determined to absorb, take on the characteristics, the body language, postures and styles typically found in American black ghettos: jeans with a baggy, low crotch, hooded sweatshirts and so on, serving to hide the face, even at night. A whole series of body signals that spoke in favor of anything but a repression of the physical, corporeal realm, if anything, celebrating its overwhelming, domineering, peremptory presence. The basketball shoes, the mythology of physical performance, the heroes and stars of basketball, boxing and football, with their shimmering sweat, blood and tears, as the most interesting fluids in circulation. One cannot help but be amazed at the new fascination with all of these manifestations of hyper-present corporeal physicality, elements like sweat in an age that tends to institutionally repress bodily fluids (saliva sweat, sperm and blood etc.) which are seen as a dangerous threat, sources of possible contamination.
The European youth I’m addressing, people aged between 20 and 30 years, display certain characteristics that I find endearing, imbuing them with a cosmopolitan uniformity, despite their local differences. The first characteristic I’m thinking of is the fact of having grown up surrounded by so-called thinking machines.
I mean the first thing these kids saw after relinquishing their mother’s breast was a video game or computer. They were born into the digital world; they’re not like you or me who have had to painstakingly learn a certain mastery of these gadgets. Someone told us you could write a better business report by doing it on this machine or in that program and with this other machine one you could write a better University thesis or a better letter on some other device, plus you can modify all your texts.
It was different with the younger generation, they’ve absorbed all this computer stuff at the level of their chromosomes; they’ve got it in their blood, so to speak. They are the digital generation and are tackling their life’s work with an enormous advantage, a phenomenal ability compared with ours.
They are the children of a corporeal physicality that would seem to conflict with the digital world, but to their way of thinking it is exactly the same thing, because even physicality must create mental states. In the final analysis, it all boils down to the mind, anyway. Even the drugs they use are substances that serve primarily to produce mental experiments. The so-called "get-high" culture has been replaced by a chemical culture featuring a mix of drugs concocted in a way that allows you to stay up until 8 in the morning without sleep, just to see what would happen to you if you didn’t get any sleep for a whole night - all of which may well be thoughtless, foolish behavior, but, one must admit, it is a genuine form of mental experimentation.
They also happen to be very, very inclined to listen to other people. They are real admirers of skill and ability and to this extent much more American than the rest of us. We have absorbed the more dramatic aspect of the American civilization, the culture of competition. We see the American civilization as hyper-competitive, forgetting the "good news", the other side of the coin, so to speak, i.e. the fact that although America admires competition, it also admires competence. To their way of thinking, if you know how to do something, you will "make it", be successful. This is more or less the American mantra, in other words there’s a genuine admiration for people who know how to do something, imbuing such people with positive values.
Now, it’s pretty much up to us to see to it that this surge in youthful innovative spirit, based largely on know-how and physical-corporal skills and competence, is appreciated and assimilated into the European work force, because at the level of norms and support systems we are already more or less harmonized. The real question is whether this talent will be perceived as a patrimony to make the most of or end up as another lost opportunity in the battle for innovation.
» Taken from the Mindstyles Seminar on Epidermal Cosmopolitanism by Alberto Castelvecchi May 19, 1999
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