Barbara Benedettelli returns to bookstores with Dangerous Connections, an essay that analyzes the impact of digital capitalism on our lives, starting with a key concept: attention. In this new work, the author focuses on how online platforms collect and use users’ personal data, turning it into raw material through algorithms that fuel profit-making. The volume’s release comes at a time in history when technology is advancing at supersonic speed, forcing us to reevaluate, with urgency, the consequences of this evolution.
In the book, Benedettelli reflects on what she calls the “techno-demia,” a phenomenon that, according to the author, “invests the people still unable to protect themselves,” exposing them without too many filters to an environment in which attention-and therefore users’ time-becomes the most valuable commodity. A process that involves everyone, especially young people, who are offered a rapidly growing digital universe, often without the necessary tools to experience it with awareness.
Covid-19 and the resulting lockdowns accelerated the phenomenon, giving Big Tech fertile ground. According to Benedettelli, the pandemic has in fact allowed them to “experiment” on millions of people forced to spend entire days online, including the youngest children, who found themselves spending a crucial period of their growth in a condition of “objective social withdrawal.” A context in which school and family have had to give way to digital platforms, which have become the new great agencies of socialization.
“The search for users’ attention to monetize ads is driven by algorithms,” the author writes, highlighting how the latter create a stream of personalized content for each individual, which ends up reinforcing beliefs and biases within real “filter bubbles.” The result is an increasingly polarized debate, in which the supply of products-but also of ideas and lifestyles-is tailored to the individual user.
Benedettelli draws attention to the long-term consequences: the attention economy is in danger of replacing the traditional market economy, pushing us to stay connected as long as possible and making us unwitting protagonists of constant data mining. In the book, the author questions the responsibilities of platforms and the need to strike a balance between innovation and the protection of rights, especially for the younger generation.
Through direct language and numerous examples, Dangerous Connections warns of the risks of a system that capitalizes on our time, showing how the ease of use of digital services can conceal a sophisticated control mechanism. Benedettelli addresses concrete questions, “How does this happen? And most importantly, how do we get out of it?”
The article Dangerous Connections, Barbara Benedettelli’s new essay on digital capitalism comes from TheNewyorkese.
