CONNECTIVISM: FROM THE PREMISES TO THE BEYOND

This article offers an outline of Connectivism (Connettivismo), one of the most recent Italian literary movements. It began in 2004 as a particular expression of Italian literature at the beginning of the 21st century, in a historical context characterised by the relevant influence of the Internet on literary texts and by the flourishing of intense debate on several literary blogs. In the initial part of the article, the history of Connectivism is illustrated, with specific reference to its main publications and its Manifesto. The core themes of Connectivism are the interplay between science, technology and humanistic culture; the interaction between human beings and IT components; the new challenges of ecology; the dimension of the Depth, mainly according to Jungian psychology; and the theme examined here: the concept of the Beyond. The Beyond has a twofold meaning, referring to the limit and purpose of human knowledge—in relation to the boundaries of the exploration of the universe—and to the dimension of the intuitive comprehension of the spiritual roots of Being. Towards this end, passages by Connectivist authors, critics who studied the movement and classical authors who inspired the Connectivist poetics (such as Stanisław Lem and Giovanni Papini) are compared here.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the influence of Stanisław Lem’s works, an outstanding representative of Polish science fiction, philosopher and futurologist, on the shape of reality in which we currently function. Undoubtedly, Lem’s writings are a collection of predictions that describe, with unprecedented accuracy, the technologies of virtual reality, nanotechnology, biotechnology or robotics long before they were created. Are we living in a world that was described by one man many years ago? The research method used in this study is the content analysis of the selected novels by Stanisław Lem and the analysis of available secondary data. Let us therefore examine, on the one hand, the predictions of the Polish writer related to the development of the latest technologies, the advent of which he forecasted many years before they were created, and, on the other hand, let us consider what social consequences resulting from such a rapid progress in the field of technology the Polish futurologist warns us about.