La Media Education come pratica di mediazione con l'alterità digitale

The virtual, in its various forms and declensions, has promoted the birth of the infosphere (Floridi, 2017), an ecosystem dominated by a continuous flow of information in which both social institutions and individuals incorporate the "logic" of the media. People's lives themselves are becoming Onlife, a junction that continuously receives and redistributes information (Serres, 2015) through a media process (Hepp, Hjarvard, Lundby, 2015).
The disintermediation taking place at the level of social, cultural and political structures also includes the working environment, promoting a change of perspective with respect to the interaction between man and machine. The transformation of work due to the 4th industrial revolution sees a connection between people, machine learning and products which can interact with each other through the "internet of things". The result of these processes is the production of an enormous amount of big data that artificial intelligences are able to transform into information and consequently change the productivity, speed and communication processes of any sector (Costa, 2018).
From the educational point of view, the current revolution linked to artificial intelligence and to digital in general is changing human beings on an anthropological level, and the new knowledge will make possible a transformation of the body, the brain and the mind that will redefine the very idea of living organisms (Harari, 2019). We are already feeling this evolutionary transformation in its primordial forms when we rely on the computing power of the algorithms that inform us and choose for us the fastest way to reach a place, the cheapest product, the news that interests us, the books we should read and the opinion leaders to follow. It therefore becomes necessary to recognise the birth of a digital "Other" of a complex nature, that has a virtual connotation but which affects everyone's existence in a real way, becoming an integral part of us.
This superimposition of virtual objects and places with the real ecosystem is possible thanks to augmented reality, which makes it possible to insert virtual incursions into the real by creating what some scholars call the mirror world (Gelernter, 1992). Everything that exists in the real world will have a digital counterpart in the "mirror world" with which to interact and relate by wearing an augmented reality viewer. This new platform, still under construction, will digitise the whole world, attempting to connect the two worlds, real and virtual, atoms and bits (Kelly, 2017).
There is therefore the need to adopt an interpretative approach to recognise this new cognitive interface under construction, which is able to recover the role of intermediation between the world of education and that of the media. Currently, this task is implicitly delegated to those who are designing the digital ecosystem through the control of technologies and algorithms.
Media education can assume a strategic training role in this scenario because it allows the activation of practices of critical knowledge of the new media and the environment in which they are developing. Learning to recognise otherness (Jullien, 2018), including in its digital form, becomes an opportunity to rediscover the implicit things that underlie human nature and the hybridisations taking place between man and machine (e.g. cyborgs as entities that graft mechanical parts onto organic parts) through a continuous work of mediation and
dialogue between real and virtual.