Introduction to Stefano Mirti’s Il Mondo Nuovo

Published in Alessandro Mininno, “Introduction”, in Stefano Mirti, Il mondo nuovo. Guida tascabile #design #socialmedia #alterazioni. Milano: Postmedia Books, 2013.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein

My work consists in helping companies communicate online.

Certainly there are more glamorous professions: the astronaut, the broker, the architect. Yet it is a curious activity and, in certain respects, actually interesting.

A field without experts

Primarily because it is an activity that, until a few years ago, did not exist. A small example: much of my work runs through Twitter, a social network that only opened in 2006 (and took a few years to spread).

In my field, the most senior expert has seven years of experience — another way of saying that experts don’t exist. Moreover, the platforms I work on change so rapidly that even if experts existed, their knowledge would be obsolete within a few months.

Online communication is a volatile, ethereal, ever-shifting subject: it demands continuous updating and a fair amount of mental labour. These are not topics one can learn, once and for all, in a book or at university: reasoning and common sense are far more important than accumulated knowledge for actually making things work.

Every day I ask myself what purpose my consulting serves: why can’t my clients do it themselves?

Schools don’t teach curiosity

At school, nobody teaches us to be curious or to build relationships. Yet right now these are two fundamental capacities for surviving in a rapidly changing context.

In a period of transition — such as the present — in which the tools for communication are changing faster than the end users, companies struggle to adapt even as they sense the potential.

The blame cannot lie with social networks: they are designed to be used by a fourteen-year-old (and in fact teenagers use them in abundance, though not the same ones as their parents). It is not even a generational issue: digital ineptitude is widespread regardless of age.

My curiosity about social-media sceptics and the technology-impaired has led me to a closer analysis: they are everywhere. Refined editors at major publishing houses who refuse to have a Facebook account. Marketing directors afraid of negative comments on their companies’ products. Museum curators who dismiss the web, tout court, as a waste of time. Respected professionals who refuse to use the internet to keep up to date. Not to mention candidates for internships who candidly admit they don’t read blogs, don’t have a LinkedIn profile, don’t have internet at home.

Specialisation vs. connection

What causes this mental laziness — this neo-Luddism that prevents people from using these tools? I suspect that at the root of it all is school, understood as a place of education and learning.

Academic training teaches us to explore a single subject vertically and specialistically, until we become experts in it. I suspect that, on its own, this approach is obsolete and harmful. What we need is the ability to search and to trace connections — to make critical links between subjects, or connections between people.

There is no difference between virtual and real: the bonds we forge online are no different from those forged In Real Life.

I imagine these ideas might sound obvious. It took me a long time to understand them, because the world I grew up in was not like this. When I was born, the internet did not exist. But fortunately, people like me are becoming extinct.

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