Discussion panel, Università degli Studi di Roma 3: How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?

Our group focused on borders and border crossing in relation to interdisciplinarity in the Internet age. The first part of our discussion covered issues like the relationship between academic journal and blogs in interdisciplinary intellectual discourse, as well as forms of transmedia storytelling from narrative texts to narrative landscape. Following our stimulating discussion, one of the first questions to answer is the following: does our Internet “brainframe” (De Kerckhove) influence the way we approach the disciplines and their relation to each other? I have gathered a few thoughts on this issue. In a media ecological perspective, the answer would be positive. The assumption would be that the socio-technological environment we live in has an impact on the way we conceive knowledge and interact with the world. In this sense, representation and cultural practice are strictly related to the technologies that, respectively, produce and facilitate them. As Neil Postman said, “Our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture”. Drawing on Postman, we could then reformulate the questions above in the following terms: what does the border crossing of the Internet tell us about interdisciplinarity? And, more precisely, how does the rhizomatic structure of the Internet contribute to interdisciplinary thinking? How is this competing with the other media through which we develop and communicate knowledge, especially the book? In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan emphasizes that the way we have conceived knowledge up to the electronic age has been influenced by the linear narrative structure of the printed book and the predominance of the sight on all other senses. The so-called “book mentality” has significantly contributed to giving a sense of an ending to our narratives and creating our “point of view” on the world. Also, it has encouraged disciplinary specialisation and the fragmentation of knowledge. If we consider academia as the place in which specialised knowledge is developed to its highest levels, we could further explore how virtual interconnectedness is challenging the compartmentalisation of physical and disciplinary areas in our universities, how new narrative forms of knowledge can co-exist with traditional ones and what consequences the former and the latter would have on knowledge development in our networked culture.

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