The question of the Third: A New Social Contract for the Networked Society of Information. Beyond Citizenship.

The process of legitimization of our western societies is made out of conflicts and it is structured as a conflict. In the history of political modernity this holds true. Our hypothesis is that, today, the im-pact of social computing and the spread of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) does not eradicate the conflicting nature of society but invites us to rethink the structure of the con-flict and the statute of the participants and the beneficiaries to the conflict in a different perspective: notably, in a perspective that defeats the “human narcissism”, that is, the traditional anthropocentric construction and understanding of the reality. Such different perspective requires us to envisage, for the globalized, networked society of information, the idea of a new social or natural contract, which acknowledge a relevant third perspective: that of the nature (Serres) or of the infosphere (Floridi).