The telephone extends life

In recent days, Zuckerberg has announced mass layoffs in Meta, which also involved Italy: 11,000 people in all, which correspond to about 13 percent of society and are almost three times the number of people left home by Twitter. which laid off 50 percent of its workforce on Nov. 4. The origin of the current situation should be traced back to Zuckerberg’s obsession with the metaverse. A former Meta employee claims it’s these distractions from its core business that are hurting the company and have led to layoffs these days.
But the real point is that what we buy today is no longer the telephone so dear to the ‘boomers’; rather one should call it a connection tool.
When Meucci, a sort of Pythagorean Archimedes, adventurer, Mazzinian, exile, invented the telephone he had so little means that the Scotsman Bell took possession of it when the patent expired, so much so that he was the first to patent a functional telephone.
But Meucci’s historical era generated the telephone, a devilry very different from the current one which only later combined the function of emotional communication of the telephone with business communication.
Today the telephone call has become a post-telephone call in which the individual moves from the objective of real communication, which he initially achieved with the telephone, to the text which today has completely supplanted the function of the telephone call and which has completely different canons from the phone.
Here is the text so dear to Zuckerberg created Meta, an alternative reality generated by artificial intelligence that determined the watershed between ‘boomers’, millennials and generation Z.
The telephone, originally a means of generating a sort of electrotherapy which was used to connect distant people, has now become a device for connecting people who are hopelessly close. The device has ushered into a giant condominium meeting that we are not ready for. In the past, telephone communication allowed you to interrupt the interlocutor, today communication by wa is paradoxically slower; it is made up of writing and answering at slightly staggered tempos in which you cannot interrupt so much so that the ‘brilliance’ of the vocal is a ‘vent’ that allows you to speak in one go without interruption and even if you speed up the speed it forces the interlocutor to listen to you until the end.
Tim’s advertisement in the 90s according to which ‘A phone call lengthens your life’ was a promise whose canons are completely reversed today: the phone call does not serve to connect distant people because individuals are absolutely close if they want with the ‘video call’ , feverishly waiting for the tick of the message in which we no longer know how to deal with the unknown telephone who is more often than not an automatic responder.
The device is such an offshoot of our body that we agree to get rid of it in two cases: when the battery runs out or when we forget it at home.
From Meucci to ZucKerberg, the connection device (once a telephone) has become an extension of our body in which conversation has not lost its meaning only because this new device is a part of our body and we do not give it up so easily (on the telephone and to our body I mean).
And it is no apocalyptically necessary to argue that once upon a time the relationships managed by the telephone were different and better because I don’t remember the moods of the people on the telephone as particularly brilliant unless the telephone transferred authentic emotional states of distant people or it was precisely to ‘extend life’. But in this case we are talking about a successful TIM marketing strategy.
I can’t imagine what the metaverse will deliver to Generation Z which obviously isn’t mine.
The reflections and suggestions generated by the essay I’ve just read by Bruno Mastroianni (Sentimental history of the telephone: from Meucci to the homo smartphonicus) are perhaps just enough to prepare for a new season of entrepreneurial choices in which the powerful , with the metaverse, to move into virtual environments where we will study, work, dance and even make love.
A practical application of this new experience has been available since 21 September this year.
In fact, in Palermo, the Federico II Foundation has made innovation and the safeguarding of our artistic heritage its main commitment in the cultural management of Palazzo Reale; for this reason, with “μετα experience” he wanted to set up a futuristic place, in which the viewer can immerse himself in the dimension of the Infinity Room and get to know the masterpieces of Italian art more closely. A permanent experiential space where technology and innovation are totally at the service of art; here, in a real symbiosis with the masterpieces of art, the viewer will be able to fully discover the creative process that leads to the creation of an artistic object, thanks to the dematerialization and materialization of the works in front of the originals, and finally leading to home the result of this process, i.e. the same works of art in eco-sustainable materials.
the user is literally projected into a parallel dimension, in which the works of art are protected over time, unharmed forever by any agent that could damage them, but above all they are consigned to memory forever: for a century and a half photography has protected the memory of works of art, transmitting at least one image of them to posterity, today is the era of the smartphone and digital technologies.

‘Homo smartphonicus’ in this new context is considered modern, up-to-date and culturally advanced. And it probably is even if he doesn’t intimately grasp the real change in which he is immersed.
He will wake up, perhaps with a start and find his relationship with people and with nature changed. And the phone will not have lengthened his life on the contrary…