THE PROBLEM YESTERDAY:
decipihering messages
THE PROBLEM TODAY:
metabolising
messages
THE ROSETTA STONE TODAY
Here we are writing again, facilitated by technology and by the fascination of coming into contact with other people, “live”.
A flood of words mixed with signs which have shaped a new syntax and an approximate code of acceptable behaviour. However, the ease of producing messages and receiving an immediate answer does not help ensure the quality of the contents. From a consumerism of things we have progressively passed on to an emotional consumerism that leads us to seek in an improbable Second Life, on television or Internet, those same experiences we all too often burned in our First Life, without ever being really aware of the fact.
In every period of history, technology has always been neutral and indispensable: it is capable of putting up with the most sinister consumerism or else of helping us to channel the most profound philosophical and scientific speculation. In fact it is up to us to make the choices.
When writing or drawing represented hard work, because it meant scratching on or cutting into a stone, our forefathers were effectively and magnificently synthetic: a graffito, a hieroglyph, an ideogram, or a word conveyed a whole concept. An ablative absolute of two words, in Latin, requires a whole sentence to translate it into Italian. Behind the gesture, or the
hand that sculpted, that drew or that wrote there was always a complete thought: what it was desired to communicate had to be worth the fatigue of being represented graphically.
The INAIL version of one of the most traditional, and well loved, instruments of the world of information is based on this invitation to a “well thought out writing”. The little book for noting things down. The cover is in a material that visually recalls the stone and has letters sculpted on it, in an apparently chance order, which instead compose a sentence having a complete sense. We have taken as our inspiration the Rosetta stone. For the scientists of the Napoleonic age the problem was: to decipher. For us present-day men and women the problem is: to metabolise. What?
For example a social message capable of making our existences less problematical: Safety is a Culture to be put on and worn. Each and every day.
In the age of blogs, of user generated contents and of the social network, of communication which is born and circulates thanks to individuals, we can count on the contagion of communication, on the viral nature of a message which, the more it is metabolised, the more it induces us to participate and to share in it.
Marco Stancati Director of Communication, INAIL Italian Workers Compensation Authority
m.stancati@inail.it