From Caravaggio to Braque: Digital Technology and the Illusion of Augmented Responsibility

This paper aims to explain how in a postmodern complex and multidimensional eco-system the macro-micro social connections entailed by digital technology transform individuals into multidimensional or ‘augmented’ subjects. In this scenario, if the Homo Oeconomicus (Hirshman, 1979) is the modern evolution of the Homo Sociologicus (Dahrendorf, 1966), in the Internet Age (McLuhan, 1992, Castells, 2002, Giddens, 1990, Bauman, 2007) the individual’s ideal type appears to be a ‘Homo Augmentatus’ (‘Augmented Individual’). The resulting higher grade of freedom of choice leads to an evolution of the concept of the subject’s responsibility into an ‘Augmented Responsibility’ or a complex-multidimensional construct, where freedom of the act of choice is exerted by hyper-subjective norms and values. At the opposite, digital technology is progressively taking over part of the individual’s decision-making processes of information selection (search engines). The Situational Context Theory confirms this contrast, as the recent accelerated evolution of digital technology (IoT, NFC, VR, Implantables), by reinforcing the trend of progressive reduction of the physical distances between the ‘augmented individual’ and technology, makes technology further more competent than the subject in dialoguing with the situational environment. As a result, human free-choice based responsibility, which initially appeared ‘augmented’, in reality, is decreasing and becoming an illusion, quite as the cubism illusionism of Braque and Picasso painting.