Redesigning Worldwide Connections

Michele Bonazzi · Valentina Di Simone

Jan 2016 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

In the next twenty years, the convergence of robotics, informatics, nano-bio-technologies, genetics, information technologies, and cognitive sciences will have a significant impact on society. This convergence will lead to a revolution in the way that science, health, energy, resources, production, consumption and environment are conceptualised. However, these technologies will also pose new and specific challenges in terms of sustainability, ethics, and even expectations of the future. Indeed, today, the word “future” is often associated with pessimism and fear, much more than it was in the past.

In order to face all these technological, ethical and cultural challenges, governments, industries and societies will need a robust cognitive framework, in order to grasp the complex dimensions of the technological convergence in progress, and must rapidly develop effective strategies to face the situations that will, unavoidably, take place. This book provides, through systemic and complexity theories, some of the theoretical tools necessary to tackle the opportunities and risks of the future.

About the author

Michele Bonazzi received a PhD in Sociology from the Alma Mater Studiorum at the University of Bologna. He published the article “Il calcio nelle dinamiche di consumo: le forme del marketing e la costruzione di un'identità condivisa” in the journal Sociologia della Comunicazione, and is the author of La digitalizzazione della vita quotidiana. He currently works at the Alma Mater Studiorum at the University of Bologna and at the G. d’Annunzio University, Pescara-Chieti, and his research interests include digital media, consumption and communication.

Valentina Di Simone is a PhD researcher at the G. D’Annunzio University, Pescara-Chieti. She is active in the fields of social innovation, health policies, and radical innovations. More specifically, she is working on the impact of radical innovations, such as those in the medical and genetics fields on the socio-economic trajectories of the near future. She studies the tension between scientific innovators and the consolidated (neo-feudal) interest, focusing on scientific communication, and is particularly interested in the consequences of radical changes and new ways to afford them.