Smart society

Abstract

Ages often appear as such due to a semantic and lexical recurrence. To say they stand out, more clearly because there is a term that characterizes them more than any other and that outlines their fundamental contours. In the current phase this term/concept is that of “smart”. This is the era – described by newspapers as well as science – of the smart community, the smart economy, smart governance, as well as the smart home, smart people, smart work and the increasingly dominant smart city. It is the era in which the economy, as well as politics, communities, houses, people and work, and first of all the city, are called to take on a new guise, that of “intelligence”. In this way, smartness becomes the new horizon of contemporary society to conform sense and practice on a global scale. But what does being, living, behaving, consuming, working and governing in a “smart” way mean? What idea of smartness does society want to implement? After a brief excursus on the concept considered and on its explanatory fields, the analysis will focus on the “smart society” as an image and as an overall reality. The cognitive objective is to understand which processes have determined it and which horizon of meaning it follows. As part of this cognitive effort, we will ask ourselves how much the “paradigm” of intelligence is really promising and with respect to what, and how smartness is a guarantee of full growth or even development. The conditions for the realization of all this, with its key players examined in the following essays – mainly smart people, smart communities, smart homes and smart politics – will play an important role above all in the perspective of social integration: a challenge from which no social order can be exempted and which no technological and efficiency paradigm seems capable of guaranteeing itself. Or, at least, not in deterministic terms.