Micropower. The power of the citizen in the digital age

The Internet was just the beginning. Not since the invention of the printing press has there been a technological change with as many repercussions for the history of mankind as the one we have experienced with digitization. The dream of exchanging information at low cost and in practically zero time has become a reality. Unprecedented access to information, the possibility for each individual to create or join networks and participate in them, accompanied by an almost unlimited flow of data in real time, is changing the power relations in our society.

The voice of the citizen has found, in the new technologies, channels to actively participate in shaping public opinion. Consumers, shareholders, students, ordinary citizens, in short, are now more relevant because they have become nodes in increasingly influential social networks. There is a transfer of power from institutions to individuals acting cooperatively in the network: this is the birth of Micropower.

The classic powers will have to learn to relate to these new participants in the great game of societies. Those who know how to adapt will find them as allies. Those who do not perceive the change will wake up, like Swift’s Gulliver, gripped by the web of infinite threads of the “insignificant” Liputians.