From “real virtuality” to the Knowledge Society:knowledge, information, format in the digital era

Early in the nineties I wrote some papers and articles entitled “Real Virtuality ...” to emphasize, in the scenario of ideas and potential future application some concrete results and case study. Today in 2005, more than ten years after the explosion of the Internet a wide range of technologies are on the shelf a number of application and services are available, what is missing? Which are the opportunities and the threats? Digital communication is the most recent ring in a long chain, starting from non verbal communication and gesture, over languages, signs and writing, to print, broadcasting and other media and formats. Do we use in a proper way digital communication? To what extent are we exploiting the potential offered by digital media? Multimedia is just a “bare sum” of different media or more? Virtual reality means just navigation in digital replicas of real worlds? The idea, following Renée Descartes, is to start from tabula rasa (scratch) and to look at the past in order to find out some “signs, evidences” in order to reach a proper format for the new digital media. New technologies enabling new media and formats, such as interactive virtual reality or on-line multimedia, provide a good opportunity to find out new ways of communication and especially to bring to new life some “lost” formats. Some technologies are (re)enabling (new) communication formats. Today people have the opportunity to create digital objects, which is a new class of objects from the ontology point of view, and they can use “multimedia technologies” and “Internet”, both providing some powerful tools for communication, but which are not yet very well developed and used. Virtual & enhanced reality, as well, represents a powerful tool for the transfer of information and knowledge, because it allows to transfer information from the usual symbolic way (i.e. reading books) to the opportunity to explore and “touch” nonmaterial things or concepts. By doing so, we will transfer our way to approach information and knowledge from symbolic to experimental, hands-on mechanism. Mankind through the centuries has produced an even increasing amount of content in different formats, with different techniques and technologies. Some portions of such content must survive and reach future generation as our legacy, major part of content, if kept alive, is addressed to natural obsolescence and will disappear. Formats, techniques and technologies differs very much both from culture to culture and from time to time. Oral tradition is still alive as major tool in order to preserve and communicate content in several different areas of the world . Performing arts and rituals are the backbone of many different culture as well as signs, symbols, ideograms and alphabets are common tools for writing and printing in major part of the world. Print was one of the last true revolutions in content management a true milestone. Nowadays we are facing a potential new revolution thanks to the “digital age”. Digital communication is the most recent ring in a long chain, starting from non verbal communication and gesture, over languages, signs and writing, through print, broadcasting and other media and formats. Following the same “fil rouge” knowledge and complex structured information transfer finds a powerful tool in interactive virtual reality. The extension of the concept of cultural heritage of various nature, including “intangible” heritage, the relationship between their conservation and the relative fruition issues new challenges for technology such as the combined utilisation of various resources online, the creation of supranational and multilingual dictionaries and thesauri, the creation and tuning of a new generation of communication objects and tools designed in order to better fit with different cultural models and content. The rapid obsolescence of technologies furthermore imposes the attention to data storage. However, the aspects, which most involve the online user, are both the interface and easy access to different subjects and contents. Last but not least we will consider opportunities and threats due to the implementation of the so called e-society and the increasing gap between on & off- line people.