It is a brilliant essay, surprising and perplexing that we propose Alessandro Baricco. The ialien novelist uses the metaphor of the Great Wall of China, which was built to protect the empire of refined medium and cultured barbarian hordes. Like almost all "walls", it was no use, barbarians making it breaches or bypassing. Anyway for Baricco barbarians are not outside but here it is the new generations trained in the age of television and the internet and whose modes of apprehending reality profoundly different from those like him, and yet many of us belong to the old world. For Baricco it is not an invasion but a mutation, that does not make it easier to accept. So are its effects: "the surface instead of depth, speed instead of reflection, the sequence in place of the analysis, surfing instead of deepening, communication instead of expression, multitasking instead of specialization, pleasure instead of stress. A systematic dismantling of all the mental language of culture inherited from the 19th century, romantic and bourgeois ... "Obviously this can not -be easy to live for non-mutants, those who remain attached to a certain civilization. It is therefore useless to want to build a great wall, it is the technological changes that produce this new man, strange but not abroad (the book is written in Italian context, its transposition into French context can lead us to a reflection about immigration which we can see here that it is not the primary reason for the feeling of dispossession of peoples to their own culture, the simple effects of progress will suffice). This is where this test can be depressing as there is no deep much to do, other technologies in the past have produced other mutations and such is life, humanity is still there . Certainly ... It remains to say that this book is pleasant reading. Baricco's teacher, he multiplies the examples in the worlds of wine, football (very knowledgeable) and culture, he uses many animal metaphors, culinary, music. Aware that his thesis is not easy to digest it surrounds us with care.
