The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Paperback

by Dhiren Bahl (Editor), Moreno Confalone (Illustrator), David Carr (Editor)

"It isn't easy to find an informed and critical look at the impact of digital media practices on human lives and minds. Ivo Quartiroli offers an informed critique based in both an understanding of technology and of human consciousness." -Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs. "Aware of the profound and rapid psychological and social metamorphosis we are going through as we 'go digital' without paying attention, Ivo Quartiroli is telling us very precisely what we are gaining and what we are losing of the qualities and privileges that, glued as we are to one screen or another, we take for granted in our emotional, cognitive and spiritual life. This book is a wake-up call. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates should read it." -Derrick de Kerckhove, Professor, Facolt di sociologia, Universit Federico II, Naples, former Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. "People today, especially young people, live more on the Internet than in the real world. This has subtle and not-so-subtle effects on their thinking and personality. It is high time to review these effects, to see whether they are a smooth highway to a bright interconnected future, or possibly a deviation that could endanger health and wellbeing for the individual as well as for society. Ivo Quartiroli undertakes to produce this review and does so with deep understanding and dedicated humanism. His book should be read by everyone, whether he or she is addicted to the Internet or has second thoughts about it." -Ervin Laszlo, President, the Club of Budapest, and Chancellor, the Giordano Bruno Globalshift University. "Ivo Quartiroli here addresses one of the most pressing questions forced upon us by our latest technologies. In disturbing the deepest relations between the user's faculties and the surrounding world, our electric media, all of them without exception, create profound disorientation and subsequent discord, personal and cultural. Few subjects today demand greater scrutiny." - Dr. Eric McLuhan, Author and Lecturer "Ivo Quartiroli is mining the rich liminal territory between humans and their networks. With the integrity of a scientist and the passion of artist, he forces us to reconsider where we end and technology begins. Or when." -Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist and author of Cyberia, Media Virus, Life, Inc. and Program or Be Programmed. "You might find what he writes to be challenging, irritating, even blasphemous and sacrilegious. If so, he has proven his point. The Internet, Ivo suggests, might just be the new opium of the masses. Agree with him or not, no other book to date brings together the multitude of issues related to how the seductions of technology impinge upon and affect the development of the self and soul." -Michael Wesch, Associate Professor of Digital Ethnography, Kansas State University It is nearly half a century since Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the medium is the message. In the interim, digital technologies have found an irresistible hook on our minds. With the soul's quest for the infinite usurped by the ego's desire for unlimited power, the Internet and social media have stepped in to fill our deepest needs for communication, knowledge and creativity - even intimacy and sexuality. Without being grounded in those human qualities which are established through experience and inner exploration, we are vulnerable to being seduced into outsourcing our minds and our fragile identities. Intersecting media studies, psychology and spirituality, The Digitally Divided Self exposes the nature of the malleable mind and explores the religious and philosophical influences which leave it obsessed with the incessant flow of information.

Author Biography

Ivo Quartiroli has been a software programmer, publisher of Italian technology and spirituality books, and computer science book author. Complementing his accomplishments in information processing are explorations in consciousness processing. He writes for Italian magazines about technology and society and blogs on media studies, psychology and spirituality at indranet.org. He sits on the Italian Club of Budapest's science committee.