The name is absent

which there will be a significant increase in the quality and quantity of
education, information and culture in our society.

In parallel with the digitalization of our society, today we are
experiencing what can be called a virtualization process. This can be
understood through the reconfiguration of space and time which transforms
our conception of reality. The virtualization and ‘acceleration’ of our society
affects the image in a process that it is not yet complete and has an
uncertain future. The facility to access the image and the diegetic worlds of
the unrealities that we have created, almost without clear limitations of time
and space, renders the connections and boundaries of our lives and the
unrealities more and more blurred. Simultaneously this is represented today
by the fact that we have even disposed of the wires that previously
connected our devices to these technological unreal environments, no longer
needing special locations or occasion to immerse ourselves in virtual
experiences, becoming, in this way, like ‘nomadic’ audiences. The limitations
are diminishing as fast as the virtualization is advancing and vice versa. In the
same vein, Baudrillard describes the acceleration of modernity as one of the
main characteristics of our time which is directly related to the acceleration
of technology, events and media: ‘we have flown free of the referential
sphere of the real and the history’ (Baudrillard, 1994a: 1). The acceleration
of our world reaches a point where, in some ways, we find the disappearance
of the boundaries of reality and unreality a consequence of its inertia. In
Baudrillard’s words, we can describe it as the end of an illusion, the end of
the world as we wanted to know it.

For authors like Negroponte, to ‘become digital’ is the only possibility
remaining in order to survive in a world where information moves at the
‘speed of light’ (Negroponte, 1995). Indeed, the most relevant characteristic
of our present time is the massive presence of information. Information is
everywhere and everything is information. Information is power and control
today and this is illustrated in Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995), a William
Gibson story¹² that describes a world in which some individuals such as Johnny
(Keanu Reeves) have become ‘data traffickers’ who store and transport

¹² Longo’s film is based on Gibson’s 1981 short story of the same name.

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