cinema and television; in short, a split concerning all the innovations that
influence our lives and the way we perceive the world in which we live. Thus,
today we can find a division between apocalyptics, who believe that new
technologies will come with the arrival of a dark period, the end of
civilization and rationality, and those who uphold an optimistic and positive
mode of thought that considers the appearance of the digital era as the
opening up of a new and better world. Nicholas Negroponte and Giovanni
Sartori are two authors who represent this dialectic and dual argument.
Negroponte (1995: 230) believes that the digital era cannot be denied or
halted as it has qualities that will make it successful over time: it is
decentralized, global and has the facility to be accessed almost everywhere
at all times. However, Sartori believes that the audiovisual culture is
uneducated and therefore it cannot accurately be considered as culture.
According to Sartori (1998: 47) the predominance of the digital image
weakens our ability for abstraction; in other words, our capacity to
understand. The consequence, for him, is obvious: digitalization will produce
illiterate, uneducated and ignorant human beings. This, however, is refuted
by Negroponte (1995: 232), who believes that once new generations
appropriate global information resources, we will find new hope and dignity
in places where we currently do not expect them.
Such critical and, conversely, enthusiastic observations clearly lack the
advantages of an ambivalent, moderate, middle ground position. A digitalized
society with a global ability to understand and interpret the world will surely
benefit from access to culture, transforming the traditional educational
patterns: books will be substituted by audiovisual inter-textual material and
knowledge and memory will be replaced by acute understanding of the
information in a world in which ‘no one knows everything, everyone knows
something, all knowledge reside in humanity’ (Lévy, 1997: 20). We need to
know how to socially utilize and manage technology to take advantage of the
digitalization of the world and create a better society. In this sense, a society
composed of illiterate or perfectly educated individuals is either a utopia or
dystopia; we should shape a future, as we have the instruments to do so, in
- 38 -