Over 100,000 years ago, men communicated through gestures. In relation to social complexity and the need to communicate in increasingly context-relevant forms, communication took on increasingly complex forms. And while complexity increased over time, the need to communicate was also accompanied by the need to organize the information being communicated. The first rock carvings as well as the first artifacts were linked to magical rituals because the irreducible complexity of some phenomena led to the representation of elements to be shared and believed in, on which to create doctrines that could guide the species through the vacuity of what was opposed to what was explainable by inference. The same communicative artifacts then resulted in the creation of increasingly complex fictions (in the literal sense of the term).

When these representations were cast into social organization, States, nations, borders, and roles were born. Compared to the animal that lives according to nature, man lives in a dual world, made up of nature and constructs. And these constructs are both the object and product of communication. The questions to ask are innumerable to make a critical analysis of today's communication modes, as I do not believe that the mode of communication can be separated from the communicative intentionality that inevitably refers to the representation that is the object of transmission. K. R. Popper spoke of descriptive-emotional capacity as opposed to critical capacity. If we understand language as the ultimate term in the evolutionary process of communication, we can say that it has occurred in man:

1. as a biological adaptation to the environment and the needs related to it (development in the brain of Wernicke's Area) in a sort of passive Darwinism;
2. as a propensity for the relationship between several subjects in adapting the cultural environment to their own needs.

Many animal species communicate the arrival of a predator to their fellow creatures by emitting particular sounds, others show their availability for mating through particular changes in their behavior or even their appearance. The codes of understanding and transmission are evolutionarily assimilated by eliminating the distracted or less adaptable individual: the flamingo, heedless of the flapping of its companions at the arrival of an alligator, continues to peck unaware in the pond and is thus devoured. The unequivocal message was not correctly coded.

Do things change for humans?

Humans have developed adaptive abilities far superior to animals. But the same humans have developed those manipulative abilities that are not typical of animals. The articulation of codes and the functionality of messages in human language has gone beyond the simple aptitude for species continuity. This is not as evident as in the case of flamingos because passive Darwinism, the adaptation of the subject to the environment, has been suppressed (probably also in this case by natural selection) by a sort of active Darwinism (although I would prefer to define it as inverse), as adaptation of the environment to the subject. Popper had also dealt with children with learning difficulties.

And it was from this experience that he began to take an interest in educational problems, and in '94 he gave a measure of it in his essay "Bad Teacher Television" where a clear position on the freedom of the mind from media manipulation is evident. Popper believed that television had the ability to act unconsciously on the public, imposing reference models and personal preferences and passively inducing conformity to certain standards of opinion and behavior. He was convinced that television could spread violence in society through non-educational programming and "make us lose the normal sense of living in an orderly world where crime is the exception to the rule." This mechanism is all the more serious in the case of susceptible young people who risk confusing constructs/fictions with reality and succumbing to unrealistic images of life.

TV anesthetizes critical spirit and puts the masses to sleep, but what is worse is that it is capable of creating fictitious needs. Globalization, the advent of the Internet, and the hyperbolic crescendo of technology today do not allow us to make predictions about what the communication modes of the coming years will be. While the Internet (formally ARPANET in September 1969) represented the beginning of a first communicative revolution because it outlined the features of knowledge distributed on artifacts, Facebook in 2004 represented a profound cultural demarcation that, by adaptations that were not too slow and progressive, has now led to that system that is defined as social.

There is a substantial difference between the need to progress in communication modes due to progressive complexity and the need to "communicate regardless" because we are inserted in a context that surreptitiously excludes if we do not conform. One can no longer speak of active Darwinism, there has been a regression. We are daily pushed towards this regression. We are those flamingos that are excluded from the group if they are not online, if we use the phone to call instead of recording voice messages. The generations growing up under the eyes of a fifty-year-old are addicted to instant, asynchronous communication, devoid of confrontation and natural signs that have transcended into emoticons.

These generations then undergo a transversal communication that does not pass through instant messaging but is mediated-mediatic by means that allow its massive transmission. We go from WhatsApp to FB to the screen, to TV series with an extreme obsessiveness, almost as if we want to inhibit our own non-communication by blocking the neurotransmitters of boredom. Have you ever seen a bored teenager in recent years? No, because at the first symptom the head bows towards a cultural guillotine made of icons and notifications. Communication should be corroborated, facilitated, fluidized by technology and it is only if it is used consciously. We are made to communicate, we are born to communicate. Sapiens supplanted Neanderthal because it developed complex forms of communication. These forms have progressed to the point that (as Harari would say) they have given rise to fictions. Those fictions that today allow on the one hand organization and on the other social manipulation, shaping a cultural and evolutionary balance that marks the steps of human history. But our organizational capacity, our flexibility in orchestrating even extremely complex tasks, is not exhausted in a dual world made up of fiction and reality.

How do we organize ourselves? We do it through communication.

Through the ability to generate order based on unambiguous and shared codes. But can we really talk about communication today?

The gap between the phenomenal world and the real world, that divide that allows consciousness to express itself critically, is today compressed by a communication so instantaneous that it is devoid of content, made up of empty representations.

The metaphor that best captures this image is that of reverse-censorship. We are so free to communicate and so induced to do it quickly, violently, synthesizing our moods into an emoticon that deprives consciousness of oxytocin and the labor pains of that increasingly vocalized, forwarded, shared individual. Flattened. The same applies to mass communication in the wake of what Popper predicted, what we might call information. The real risk that technology exposes us to is that of polarized information. A communication already "affected" at the origin by a belief defined by others.

Hypodermic theory already predicted that the masses could be influenced by communication, thus manipulating the behaviors of populations exposed to messages. Propaganda had this intent. Today, technology amplifies media reach at the expense of meaning and critical analysis. Meanings are missing. What counts and what insta-techno-social communication pivots on is massification. Standardization. The argumentative confinement of living beings no longer organized by relationship but by likes. "It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium." [Walter Tevis, Mockingbird] Paul Bentley is a university professor who accidentally rediscovers reading and through books learns of the existence of a past and the possibility of change. Bentley learns to read on his own in a world where books do not exist. The human race, comforted by drugs and isolation techniques, cultivates apathy. In a New York culturally decimated by the advent of robots in 2467, Mary Lou has always refused to take drugs in order to keep her eyes open to reality. Tevis writes this in Mockingbird, published in 1980. The Italian translation of the title is "only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the wood".

The polyglot mockingbird, also known as the northern mockingbird. It has this reputation for the male's amazing vocal abilities to imitate both the songs of other birds, the sounds of other animals, and many other sounds. And it does this by its nature, to give continuation to the species. The mockingbird metaphor closes my reflection. I believe that effective communication today should be as little digital and technological as possible unless contextual conditions require it. However, if we are the ones defining the context, it is our responsibility to be able to relate to each other. A we-centric perspective must foresee few mockingbirds and much meaning in the words, gestures and emotions that we are increasingly setting aside in favor of a technological extension of our body that does not encounter physicality. We can decide to be like Mary Lou or, alternatively, we can only take that "short" journey to the Asylum of Existers by E.M.Cioran.