Internet humanism

Process and organisation

Internet humanism is the idea that the network is first of all a space of relationships between people, able to create real bonds regardless of physical meeting, and that it should be built and governed around people.

It has many authors. The Briton Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva and in 1993 had it released free of patents, so that it would belong to everyone. The American Lawrence Lessig, who in 2001 founded Creative Commons, the licences through which authors allow others to reuse and share their work. The Italian philosopher Luciano Floridi, whose concepts of the infosphere and onlife describe human life as now interwoven with the digital. In Italy one of the first avant-gardes was the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Turin, in the 1990s, when the internet was not yet fully understood or accepted in the country. There the semiologist Guido Ferraro, founder of the Centre for Semiotic Research, set up from 1992, together with Enrico Giubertoni, then a student, several research laboratories on hypertext, multimedia and companies' external communication on the World Wide Web. The Turin sociologist Luciano Gallino, who after his years at Adriano Olivetti's Olivetti studied the relationship between technology, work and society and helped found CSI Piemonte, the public IT consortium of the Piedmont region. The Italian jurist Stefano Rodotà, who in 2015 chaired the commission of the Italian Chamber of Deputies that wrote the Declaration of Internet Rights. The European contribution is clear: putting the person, their rights and their dignity at the centre of technology is the thread linking these authors to the European Digital Identity.