Antonio Sofia
Ricercatore Indire (Istituto Nazionale di Documentazione, Innovazione e Ricerca Educativa)
Antonio Sofia was born in Bari in 1977. In 2002, he graduated in Lettere Moderne with honors, at the “Università degli studi” in Bari, by presenting a critical review of movies directed by Clint Eastwood. In 2004, he earned a Masters degree in Multimedia Content Design at “Università degli studi” in Florence. From 2005 to 2014, he was a content designer, video producer, communication expert, and project manager in “Indire” (an Italian national institute of innovation and educational research). Since 2014, he has worked as a researcher at Indire. He is interested in social networks, social media, communication, data analysis, innovation and languages. He lives in Pistoia with his wife, Laura, and their little daughter, Evelina Aiko. In 2011, his novel Il mare di spalle was published by Autodafé Edizioni.
Articles of Antonio Sofia
Tutta un’altra Storia? Social network, narrazioni e identità digitali
The identity of individuals in a community, and in a “distributed” form of community, such as the social network, is formed/informed by relationships. The growing availability of information about these connections allows the quantification of social behaviors. Digital identities can be analyzed to identify – and spread – models, that is, generalizations created from the statistics of occurrences and patterns of words and colors, not just interpretations. The digital man is a “deluge of forms” more than a “material man” and the social networks design aims to in-form in order to control the actual and possible forms of a human being. Digital identities have been a proscenium of freedom and alternatives, but are now turning into stories written by the design of social networks and by the political and economic interests that drive such designs. This paper presents a reflection on these actualities, through an ideal conversation between Vilém Flusser and a few contemporary artists, sociologist, and philosophers.