Today, the Greek Abbey di San Nilo in Grottaferrata (Rome) hosted the third and final day of the International Conference "The soul within the art" (14-16 December), organised by the Cultural Association for Art Promotion in collaboration with the Ente dello Spettacolo as part of the XV season of the Tertio Millennio Film Fest. Many talks were given concerning themes such as the power of collective intelligence on line and the relationship between young people and the web.

Andrea Bonavoglia, professor of history of art at the Art High School Roma 2 and webmaster for cultural sites and magazines on-line, gave a talk which focused on collective intelligence. Today, more than 300 million websites are available worldwide, but this does not mean that even if everyone on earth was connected, there would be a greater unity: so rather than collective intelligence we should talk about shared intelligence: in this way we can describe, for example, web 2.0 as a mechanism which allows anyone to get in touch with anyone. Another example is Wikipedia, with 15 million visitors a day, it is however an unwieldy tool and not very selective therefore needs to be handled with care. Open sources are also free and open programmes, and differ from traditional programmes which cannot be opened as they are protected. Linux is an operative system like Windows but it has more than 100 variants as an open and varied system: Ubuntu, within Linux, can be a substitute for Windows, as it is more reliable and virus free because it was conceived in a completely different way.

Michele Sorice, Director of CMCS-Centre for Media and Communication Studies "Massimo Baldini" at the University Luiss Guido Carli in Rome, on the other hand looked at social communications and transformations in the world of web 2.0 and the forms of relationships. Culture is a combination of features which today are taken from two very important elements: values and rules, which are not immutable. For example, today bringing closure is seen as something negative, differently from the past. We live in multicultural societies not only because of the immigration phenomenon, but also because of the subcultures inside our society: pluralism is now a proved value: the net represents therefore the emerging place of subcultures. The concept of dialogue is not only an interlocution between two people but a relationship between more people being together. In a dialogue, words are in the middle without belonging to anyone in particular. Web 2.0 allows for a computer system where thoughts also are not attributed to anyone in particular but at the same time, to everyone. Language has changed and is based on evoking and producing knowledge; it spreads out, moving from being a spectator sport to one where all can take part. Real and virtual are not opposing, virtual is simply something powerful that can become reality, but it is not unreal or even worse something fake.

Also the talk given by the director who runs the site www.key4biz.it, Raffaele Barberio was extremely interesting. He believes that is over the top to think about this period as a total novel one: at the end of the day, we are always evolving and moving on from goals already achieved which have changed over time, as it has always been in these 2 million years of the history of man. Real discoveries are very rare, like electricity, aeroplanes and the radio in the nineteen hundreds, or printing in the fourteen hundreds, but as for all other grand ideas, which come about nothing really changes.

There were also many contributions from the students of the 'Cicerone' High school, in particular on the opportunities, but also on the dangers created by the internet and social networks.