Selvaggia Lucarelli.
I read “Pandora’s Box”, the new book by Selvaggia Lucarelli, not because I wanted to know more about the two people at the center of the author’s investigation. But rather because I wanted to better understand the impact that social media has in and on our lives. What mechanisms do they induce in those who look at them and in those who live there? This investigative book (it is worth repeating: it is not a gossip book) offers an infinite amount of analysis and information which makes it – first of all – a “media education” text. Because it really makes the reader understand how social media, having their own grammar and syntax, are able to transform and manipulate our lives: both those of those who make social media the incubator of their profits, and those of those who benefits as a spectator. The enormous mistake of the last 15 years is having given more importance to life on social media than to real life, having given media power never seen before to those who show what they eat for breakfast, which bubble bath they use, which toy they will give as gifts to your child at Christmas. There is no competence in this self-narration. There is only the triumph of an empty aesthetic, based on the cult of the image, which allows social media to transform people into content, just because they show themselves and not for that “plus” linked to their knowledge, know-how and ability be with which they should be equipped. Only faces and bodies that become prostheses of an infinite number of products and experiences for which one is appointed testimonial and influencer, in a process of self-objectification.
A “thingification” of reality and humanism that shatters and trivializes the profound complexity of our being “human beings”. “Pandoro’s Box” does not tell the story of the two most popular Italian influencers on the web, but through the history and parable of these two characters it tells about us, about how we have become fragile and vulnerable to the dopaminergic engagement of social media and hypersensitive to the glamorization of lifestyles that transform us into products and steal our soul. Ultimately, the whole issue of improper and inadequate charity is also the consequence of a way of being in the world that no longer knows how to select true priorities, which no longer knows how to place what is truly a value with a capital T from what it is profit, speculation, greed. “Pandora’s Box” is an uncomfortable but necessary book. Personally I find that it expresses judgments not on people, but on the processes and paths in which those people find themselves immersed. They are processes and paths that we all deal with every day, several times a day, when we scroll through our social media or when we publish a post, just like I’m doing right now. Who am I really, as I write these things? A professional who wants to spread the word or an inhabitant of social media who hopes to increase his reputation by talking about the most read book of the moment? I leave it to you and myself to find the answer to this question. But I am really grateful to Selvaggia Lucarelli because every page of her book forces me, from now on, to ask myself every time I propose content on social media.
on the cover, Selvaggia Lucarelli (photo Ansa)
