Are we done with (Wordy) manifestos? Towards an introverted digital humanism

Abstract

Beginning with a reconstruction of the anthropological paradigms underlying The Vienna Manifesto and The Onlife Manifesto (§ 1.1), this paper distinguishes between two possible approaches to digital humanism: an extroverted one, principally engaged in finding a way to humanize digital technologies, and an introverted one, pointing instead attention to how digital technologies can re-humanize us, particularly our “mindframe” (§ 1.2). On this basis, I stress that if we take seriously the consequences of the “mediatic turn”, according to which human reason is finally recognized as mediatically contingent (§ 2.1), then we should accept that just as the book created the poietic context for the development of traditional humanism and its “bookish” idea of private and public reason, so too digital psycho-technologies today provide the conditions for the rise of a new humanism (§ 2.2). I then discuss the possible humanizing potential of digital simulated worlds: I compare the symbolic-reconstructive mindset to the sensorimotor mindset (§ 3.1), and I highlight their respective mediological association with the book and the video game, advocating for the peculiar thinking and reasoning affordances now offered by the new digital psycho-technologies (§ 3.2).