“We don’t inhabit a nation but a language. Make no mistake: our language is our only motherland.“
Emile Cioran
With the adoption of new informational technologies on a global scale the cyberspace has pervasively entered the lives of more than half of world’s population.
The incidence of digital code seems to have no boundaries and to invest every aspect of contemporary existence by translating behaviors, opinions, desires and fears into data reserves available for indefinite uses.
Is this digital info-sphere a new form of environment which hosts our interactions in a dimension outside the space-time continuum where the boundaries between what is virtual and what is real fade away? Or is it, simply put, just the latest technological articulation of homo sapiens, capable from the very beginning of the species to detach from what is current and transcend it by means of a new language?
Whatever then answers, the evidences of every day life shows that by giving us unprecedented operational capabilities, digital technology has ended up reshaping our notion of real as well as of subjectivity and led us to inhabit its syntactic structures over the span of twenty years.
Currently under studies of experts without previous knowledge about them, the digital natives are those humans resulting by the global digital revolution who has developed social and cognitive dynamics fully formed through the use of connected devices since birth: living both offline and online the two dimensions are no longer separable for them and constitute a single hybrid support in which their life is inscribed.
With this project, still in progress, I aimed to explore the impacts of digital code on contemporary global youth population: by exploring its primary activities such as gaming, learning, sexuality, work, defence, religion and sociality, the project has been carried on as a documentary campaign over a disseminated geography – currently covering 14 countries on three continents – during the very first decades of formation of the so called homo digitalis.
