The Glocal Citizen

Reditio October 8, 2006

What we have received in the traditio [handing over] is our duty now to pass on to others [reditio].

Reditio is to return. It is an output, but always preceded by an input… because you can’t return something you don’t have. The first stages of life are a massive input… As time passes by, we tend to reach an input/output equilibrium. You take all you have received and start producing your personal output. At the beginning, output is a copy of input. When we create relations among our independent inputs we can actually create new output. We sum, we integrate, we “hyperlink”, all we have received. That’s why everything we have created can be traced throughout history back into the first “1″ of human existence: self-awareness. I AM.

I think the human ideal is to become an output-oriented being. We can’t control input, because we are designed to be open to the world that sorrounds us… we can’t help seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting… But we can choose to orient our life one way or another. We can choose to let ourselves just be motivated by the input we receive from the world… just looking to “be well”, looking for pleasant activities that can’t be transformed into outputs, because they just turn into personal memory… useful and only temporarily only to our own system. We can also choose to be an intelligent server… that receives data all the time, relates it with other data, and outputs useful knowledge for the whole network. It upgrades itself and the network.