The world has already changed

by: Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo 1

"Oh you don't want to,

it scares you

poverty,

You do not want

go to the market with broken shoes

and come back in the old dress.

Love we don't love

as the rich want,

the misery. U.S

we will remove it like an evil tooth

that until now has bitten the heart of man.

But I do not want

you fear it.

If it comes to your house because of me,

if poverty drives out

your golden shoes,

that I do not expel your laughter that is the bread of my life.

If you can't pay the rent

go to work with a proud step,

and think, love, that I'm looking at you

and we are together the greatest wealth

that never met on earth "

(Lives: poverty, Pablo Neruda).

We entered the post-digital era when phase 2 of the Covid-19 was announced on television in the morning. There we feel the weight of the running of the bulls and the reduction in the megabytes of upload and download of our transmission signal. The Internet, the energy engine that pushed industries towards the fourth industrial revolution, today is beginning to be a scarce commodity like other energy sources. Hyperconnected and hypermediated life will be in a few days, making it clear that, like water, coal and oil, the Internet may need us. The net is literally hanging by a thread. From the number of upload and download megabytes used by each family member in millions of homes in the world. With so many video downloads, online classes, virtualized meetings, video game, movie and song downloads, you can go down in any minute. The new gaps have become more than noticeable, who and why are they connecting. If we stay in a leisure area or in the co-construction of knowledge; if it is to fulfill the duties of the school, to teach a course or to close financial transactions at a distance. Gender, age, educational level and socioeconomic level are grouped into categories such as info-wealth and info-poverty. Today for many the network moves in the category of technology of hope. Many hope to find in it the other way that does not reach them either by radio, the press or television. In it they find light, swarms of trust, nuclei of joy, nodes that mask the world to come. We have only been a few weeks in the future world and we already feel nostalgia, emptiness and lack of meaning in the contents that are circulating. The world is already another and we do not hope to return to the previous one when the contingency ends. The days will be counted in another rhythm and bit rate. The economy still hangs on an even more delicate and finite thread. Stock markets fall and markets seem to contract to border closure formulas that remind us of the populist nationalist actions of past decades. The digital economy drives other engines and accelerates other markets; but not the fundamental ones. The health emergency broke the bubble of the public sphere and today on the screens we enjoy a new semi-public private sphere. We learn about decorations and hobbies depending on the frame of the webcam. Intimacy already has another meaning. Men in shirt sleeves, students taking afternoon class in pajamas. The world is a domestic extension of the bedroom. The schedules were broken, everything is a post-line continuum. We are always there, ready for the connection; to ring Skype or claim you in Zoom. We have become slaves of omnipresence. We are out of dead times and rest times. The invitation to relaxed, disconnected life served only as an accelerator of hyperconnection. The whole world spectralized their lives: they migrated from the atom to the binary code. They made an eternal image, a beam of light. The virus has already infected the network. It got into our homes and into our brains. It filled our expectations with doubts and mysteries. Eternally Connected Life is a reality show of transmitters and receivers that do not rest. Those who remained on the streets also experience hyperconnection in their own way. Without jobs, without connections of all kinds: economic and social. The new forgotten have become. The doubly excluded. People are dying alone in hospitals or transmitting their last minutes of life on a tablet. Sunday meals are transmitted by families on a cell phone. In two weeks, exponential technologies let us see that the world is different and that the world we used to know will never be the same. What follows then? How to read and write this chapter in history? From where to understand this new phase of capitalism? How to rethink our place and way of being in this new territory? We have been two weeks and I do not want to get used to the rules of this new continent

Those inside and those outside, those above and those below

For two weeks the world is different and it seems that we have begun to get used to its ways and its forms. Life in its hyperconnected modality has its norms and ways of showing what it means to be and to be. Being in the world implies being always there: connected, omnipresent, ready to call, to like or emit a feeling with an emoticon. Being in the world has its dynamics; their algorithmic expressions. Their behavior and navigation patterns. Life in the continuum has its particular codes of simulation and representation: the image. Our condition is avatars, expressed in profile picture mode. We have gone from the image in two planes to the moving image, going through the selfie, the testimonial photo that gives evidence of facts and places and that reflects emotions, moments, values or movements with which we empathize. We have left in two weeks our cult for the selfie to acquire a cult for the video, as a new way of wanting to manifest ourselves.

The success of Tik Tok, the longing for the vines, the dream of the youtuber has led many to hang their photo interacting in Zoom or participating in a Hangout. The image is a way of showing our new condition. It implies being inside, in the network. It is a way of expressing our concrete walk through the digital continent. The network is our home space today, it is our public arena. It is the place of meetings. The whole world has its mirror there: work, school, the media, banking, shops ... The whole world imploded on the net; there we are showing our capacity or inability to name and make sense of the world. Friendships, loves and heartbreaks pour into the screens. Since quarantine, lovers have sought to promote encounters that break the textual logic of the chat; video calls have become teleportation gadgets. This is how they are present in the office, at family meals, chats with friends, parties between teenagers or simulated bars in kitchen bars. We are in the permanent streaming of our lives. We have become a medium, channel and message. Transmitting ourselves is a way of telling the world "I am here." But that is only the condition of those within. A new divide has been drawn between us; now we have a new manifest class: the insiders and the outsiders. The world is counted among those who are online and offline, but also among those who stayed on either side of the window and the door. Outsiders suffer doubly from our absence. Today they suffer from this triple marginalization: that of access, that of use and that of the possibility or not of being in a permanent line due to their new social condition. They keep cleaning our streets or stocking up on groceries. Outside there are adolescent children, adults and the elderly who were left marginalized in multiple ways. Some for the economy, the structural forms, the superfluous logics of power and the very dynamics of the privilege of connection. Outsiders today are the new excluded. For two weeks the world has been different. The media warns us of those who have lost their jobs, those who continue going to their inns and cafeterias waiting for a lost person to come or order them over the phone. Parked delivery men, mothers who clean offices with half the staff missing, dispatchers at gas stations listening to the increase in infections and deaths. Shopkeepers who hope that tomorrow the world is in a better place than today. The world is very different inside than outside. Not only because of the 16 million colors that the screen projects; it is for its ways of representing fear, for the extension of the smiles caused by a change of scenery in the profile picture. For two weeks, insiders and outsiders have been in communion with those above and below. This concrete way of visualizing ourselves to understand the new info rich and info poor, the connected, the disconnected, the media, speaks to us of a new horizon that will become more and more exclusive. Today there are many privileged people who have the possibility of being under guard; But there are many more who have been left out and, as much as they want, they live among the clicks and the bricks. They are outsiders of this new structural condition. For two weeks the world has been different. I hope this wave is a passing wave and nobody gets used to seeing the world from one side of the window.

Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo (Mexico), University professor, communication researcher, President of the National Council for the Teaching and Research of Communication Sciences.