The XIX EUTIC 2024 Conference aims to continue the reflections, questions and contributions initiated at the Bordeaux meeting in October 2023. The questions and concerns that guided the debates of the 18th conference, which focused on the crisis of humanity (epidemiological, climatic, political, social and ideological crises) and the violence inflicted on us in all its forms, reveal the risks we are facing in terms of our future humanity.

All this under the protection and thrust of the technological evolution that pits digitalised humanity against social sustainability. The processes of immersion in the digital era have been dizzying in recent decades. We live in the global village and in the information age, an era of translocations of meaning, increased interdependence and unprecedented complexity, which is causing a radical alteration in the way we communicate, act, think, express, live together and inhabit the world. A world model that is predatory towards nature in general and towards human nature in particular. A time that, from anti-humanist, posthumanist and transhumanist paradigms, questions and invalidates the fertile humanist tradition, promotes the dissolution of the community in favour of immunity and technocommunity, endangering sustainability and social cohesion, while weakening and undermining democratic governance.

What remains of the great questions about the meaning of ‘the human’ and ‘the common’ in the age of microprocessors, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biogenetics, and the new economy of global capitalism, the triumph of global market reason, the information society, fake-news, corporate universities, international terrorism, struggles for territorial dominance and hegemony?

The change that best identifies the substantial transformation of everyday life refers to the omnipresence of information as the symbolic environment of socialisation. The commodification of words, the global virtual marketplace, the link, click and like economies are modes of producing profit, crucial to understanding the rapid growth of some of today’s major corporations. Googlism is to contemporary capitalism what Fordism and Toyotism were: models of factor management that spread across the globe. Mass online innovation or crowdsourcing is presented as a way of appropriating online creativity, basic to the (re)production of electronic-computing capitalism.

The ability to use information technologies is becoming more and more crucial as many services, jobs and exchanges are and will be increasingly accessible only through the network. For all these reasons, the need to train new citizens to live in a new digital environment of unknown possibilities and risks in a time and space of post-truth, with a critical and discriminating umbrella, appears with greater clarity and urgency; because, following the warning given by Chomsky in 1995, instantaneity, spectacularisation and fragmentation are the main hallmarks of information that is structurally incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.

On the other hand, we cannot fail to consider that nowadays information is produced, distributed, consumed and abandoned at a devilish pace. The increasingly accelerated speed that defines information cycles conditions the image of fragility and precariousness in the lives of human beings. Nor can we ignore the fascination it produces in the generations of recent decades who have been captivated by the promise of simplicity, speed, less effort and greater profitability, by the announcement of a happier, avatarised life in virtual reality and the metaverse.

At this point in the reflection on humanity in cyberculture we are confronted with questions such as these:

What are the prefigurations and representations of the body in transhumanist digital literature?

How do we define and think about the figure of the cyborg?

How are new forms of individual and collective identity staged or presented in hyperfictions, the avatar, dramas or interactive installations, in cybertexts such as video games?

Is the Internet set to become the new ‘public sphere’?

How do electronic textualities reflect and create new forms of association and political construction in cyberspace?

Is digital technology a social enabler of appropriation, identity and democracy in the face of the contemporary challenges facing its generations, or is it organising their loss?

Faced with the growing threat of the disappearance of the school in all its grades as a physical place for meeting, learning, conflict resolution, transmission and recreation of knowledge and values, replaced by a virtual scenario of access to knowledge and information, we continue to ask ourselves what type of social subject is emerging? What singular and plural subjectivities will make up the societies of the future??

There is already progress in answering these questions, with talk of panthalic societies, telepolis dwellers and anti-political technocommunities. A new planetary cartography is even being born, Cyberia is being mapped.

Uncertainties and dramas that place us today in a far-reaching civilisational crisis and rethink the urgent need to continue debating these crucial questions, betting on inter- and transdisciplinarity for a kind of ethical humanism of survival, which is oriented not only to the perennial declaration on the inviolable dignity of human life, but which becomes a dynamic of humanisation and communalisation that makes the world a habitable and sustainable place.

Faced with the contemporary challenges facing these generations, is digital technology a social enabler of ownership, identity and democracy, or is it organizing their demise?

It is these and other questions and concerns that we propose to deepen and discuss with the richness of your contributions at the next EUTIC 2024 meeting in the Canary Islands.

We invite you to participate.