is a legion, but the senses and meanings are lost in the economy of immediacy. We no longer have time to understand ourselves as well as the social and technical world around us.
Another thing that we find worrying is the fact that we deal with increasingly heterogeneous universes, considering the fall of the great narrative in postmodernity, which functioned as a historical straitjacket. In the present times what we have before us is simply a puzzle. The world is sick, chaotic, complex, and over-accelerated to solve problems. There is a "touristification" of reality. We became tourists in our native environment. Now we can photograph the reality with smartphones, but we cannot think the real; we can have many friends on social networks, but just a few out in the real world. Currently, the dilemma that affects us is that we are proposed to be only observers, little or no critic, and there is no time to carefully observe what surrounds us, because we have only a little "immediate" time to buy a new object, something similar to the experience of the tourists when they visit a foreign country. At a glance everything becomes a souvenir of a reality that never existed. We are more communicative, but we are more isolated; we have more credit cards, but we are poorer; we have more friends on social networks, but we feel alone. Today the subject’s condition is that of the stranger. There is no existential meaning in the present reality because this is not assertive and uniform. In this way, and before the various constellations of meaning, we are in a situation of disconnection from the environment that surrounds us. We are tourists and foreigners, alienated and observant, we are everything but actors. We are not actors. We are players of a game that is already undermined.
It is increasingly difficult to understand reality. On the one hand, individuals do not cooperate, and when we say this it means they do not cooperate in the broad and human sense of the concept of "cooperation", since it seems that this pragmatic concept, both experiential and cultural, no longer makes sense. At the present time, anyone is potentially an adversary. All good-sounding speeches seem to us transcriptions of philosophical and corporate discourses. We are far from genuine messages. The reality with which we deal with is not the same one that is shown to us via media because it lacks meaning, it lacks mediation. It is necessary to reconnect everything, which, moreover, was a task of religions, to religareman to the divine. But the modern world has become too artificial and there is no desire to reconnect the individual, even with consumption. Indeed we are free to consume. We can talk about everything, but no one listens to us. We are more trapped, poorer, less intelligent, and less agile than the machines we invented. There is a lack of meaning in our minds and in the communities we know. At this moment, the main purpose of those who have the power is to "turistify" everything. The anthropological sites are disappearing to give way to a collection of infrastructures that look more like a shopping center. So, facing this artificiality that vampirically consumes the human being, what we need is connections and more humanism through a technology that enhances what is best in each person, and not one that enslaves us.
In the present time, the individual suffers alone, suffers in a group, suffers as a citizen and suffers as a legion. Nowadays, the individual seeks meaning and enlightenment in everything that surrounds him, whether in digital media or on the Net, but the amount of information deposited in the network is such that one cannot confirm everything. And in the face of this we are in the uncomfortable position of those who do not know who to trust. The past has its subjective interpretations, the present is volatile and the future has become a multi-sensory image. So if the future has several meanings, there is no future, but "futures". This circumstance, on the other hand, also leads us to believe that despite the economy of the immediate based on presentness. However what we have is more "presentness" and this is notorious in our daily lives: no one is tuned, everyone is disconnected and there is no uniform sense. The narrative that kept a connected "whole" was multiplied and we got fragments of individuals, stories of nations, corporate speeches, advertising spots, commercial video clips. There is a lack of coherence, and in this incoherent world we choose the constellation of meaning we want. It does not matter if we choose something special, because there is nothing special anymore. Everything is personalized and specialized, so everything is self-defeating as such. The new homogeny is marked by singularity. We are all so different that we have become equally "singular." We do not know how to communicate, we have nothing in common except the products we buy and the services to which we subscribe. Humanity is more a term with many senses. Today is all "multi". The singular has no future in a universe of multiple choices and in a tyranny of the immediate.
6.Grammar of Images
In our time, everything consists of image, whether text, object, service, product, figure; everything around us becomes something imaginary because it can be photographed, reedited, etc. There is a certain grammar at the image level, as the images have codes, visual elements, links and are part of a matrix. One thing always connects to another. It is surprising to see how we try to understand the fascination that the images exert in us humans, but the truth is that we ourselves cannot live without images. Images are forms of communication since prehistoric times. Images are something mental, first of all, but they also were useful for propagandistic and warlike objectives in the twentieth century. As for the twenty-first century, our problem is different. We are overwhelmed by images. There have never been so many images available, circulating on the Net. This is a regime of images that are in close relationship and that make the bridge to the social networks. Images no longer need cameras or video. The smartphones we own are images machines. Social networks like Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, without forgetting YouTube, have increased the perimeter of the problem. More images machines lead to the production of images on a mechanic scale.
We should also mention a small detail. Images, whether electronic or not, have their own grammar. That is to say that it is possible to communicate only by means of images, since they have codes and these codes connect themselves with images; linked images are the matrices, and the matrices are the last, the final image. The grammar of the image is related to its structure of meaning. When we see an advertising or promotional image, what does it mean? What codes do you see? What do you want to communicate? Will it stand out from the rest? This is where the problem lies — originality — since everything is image-bearing, our problem is that all images become equivalent to each other. In this way, we do not have images, but rather "the image". There is a macro-image that represents everything and means everything, a kind of image-archetype. The grammar of such an image is either reductive or simply ambitious, but the grammar of the most varied images is exponential and trully interconnecting.
Each image carries with it the germ of its referential universe; the image reports what it is, what it represents, and its portfolio of associations. In other words, the same is to say that an image is a set of links, meaning that in order to understand the grammar of an image we must first understand its connections. The image, then, is what you can connect to. A weak image has only one referent in reality or in the conceptual plane, but a strong image has a greater symbolic power because it is more connective to other dimensions. Images can be divided as follows: connection images, disconnect images and isolated images. The first images are designed to be connected. For example a transmedia film has a narrative that expands in a videogame, or a film can be based on a Shakespeare’s work. The second images are images designed to be turned off. As an example, a photographic image belonging to a particular cultural and / or social elite can only be seen in an exhibition, in a certain group of days and at a certain time. If the temporal frame of a certain image is not transposed, it is inaccessible to us. The third type of images are the isolated images, which in practice are images that will never connect to anything, because they are designed to enter neither the mass media nor digital media. They are almost solipsistic images because they only exist in our head, like our dreams. An example of this kind of images is conceptual design projects before moving from vision to reality. They are images with a "beyond" potential, but they are only a "goal" unless something allows them to materialize. Yet, it does not mean that they materialize, that they translate into something concrete, they only have the potential to isolate or stop isolating, passing from isolated to off-mode or from isolated to connection of images.
What we ascertain is that even the most stealth marketing campaign for a brand of product or service can be
