Introducción: La educomunicación aumenta su presencia en la etapa universitaria, pero los riesgos de las brechas digitales y el fracaso son significativos. A través de este estudio se plantea si es viable la educación virtual, a través de pantallas y herramientas tecnológicas. El libre acceso al conocimiento es gratuito, pero se advierten peligros ligados a lo emocional, la falta de formación presencial y la espectacularización. Metodología: Se trata de una investigación exploratoria y descriptiva. Se hace una revisión bibliográfica y se estudia el desarrollo de la educomunicación, se analizan aspectos emocionales y se genera un cuestionario de validación de la enseñanza virtual. Resultados: parten de las encuestas elaboradas en los cuestionarios sobre habilidades emocionales al profesorado y estudiantes que se han perdido y que deberían desarrollarse, satisfacción, evaluación de la educación en pantallas, incidencia de la espectacularización.Discusión: Se ha comprobado que docentes y alumnos, tras la evolución del uso masivo de pantallas y nuevas herramientas, valoran ventajas a corto plazo de las TIC, como el desarrollo de nuevas metodologías, pero la pérdida de emociones, como la empatía, y la relación e intercambio con los otros y que se abre el riesgo de espectacularización y del edutainment sobre el uso y abuso de TIC. Conclusiones: Para que la educación no siga las sendas equivocadas de la espectacularización de la comunicación, debemos fomentar una investigación interdisciplinar en educación y comunicación para dar origen a un debate profundo y crítico con respecto a las nuevas herramientas, tecnologías y metodologías en el ámbito educativo.

Hurled into hypercomplexity, we are facing a complex process of anthropological transformation, of a shift in paradigms, models and codes, other than an irreversible synthesis of new value systems and criteria for judgment. Our extraordinary scientific discoveries and technological innovations not only open dizzily onto as yet unimaginable horizons and scenarios, but show, ever more clearly, the urgency of radically rethinking education, teaching and training, and of a systemic approach to complexity, which in the meantime has become hypercomplexity, underlining the substantial inadequacy of our schools and universities in dealing with this hypercomplexity, in dealing with the indeterminateness and ambivalence of the ongoing metamorphosis, in dealing with the global extension of all political, social and cultural processes. The conceptual framework of this paper, therefore, has the following objectives: a) to provide a functional definition of complexity and hypercomplexity and of our limits in understanding them; b) to highlight the urgency of a systemic approach to complexity and of rethinking education and training beyond «false dichotomies» (education determines new asymmetries and inequalities, which in turn influence educational policies). The social and cultural innovation belongs to those who will succeed in healing the fracture between the human and the technological, to those who will succeed in redefining and rethinking the complex relationships between the natural and the artificial, to those who will manage to bring knowledge and skills together (not to separate them), to those who will, furthermore, know how to unite and merge the two cultures (scientific and humanistic), both in terms of education and formative training and in defining profiles and professional competences.

Before discussing the prospects for educating young people toward becoming global citizens, we must ask ourselves: is global citizenship reality or illusion? What can be stated is that plain citizenship itself can no longer be considered merely a legal or judicial question. Today, citizenship is only partially linked to rights and duties deriving from the recognition of an individual as belonging to a community (local, national or international). Future citizens of the digitally hyper-connected global village face two dangers: simulation of participation and the illusion of having a less asymmetrical relationship to power. The rules of engagement are not being written by legislators but by agencies producing and sharing knowledge; citizenship (global or otherwise) is intimately correlated with access to quality education. Three concepts form the basis for educating toward global citizenship: awareness that citizenship and education are inseparable, awareness that democracy and education are inseparable, and awareness that democracy is complexity.

The objectives of this paper are threefold: firstly, to reconstruct the controversies and the scientific debate on the subject of complexity and on the factors determining its passage to hypercomplexity; secondly, to underline that an interdisciplinary and systemic approach which envisions objects as systems rather than considering systems as objects (as sets of divisible parts) is of the utmost urgency, calling for a radical makeover of our concepts of educative, formative and skill-related processes, overstepping the “false dichotomies” common to education and training, which reinforce the new asymmetries and inequalities emerging today; and finally, to recognize and understand the “great mistake” we are currently making in our attitude to technology in general and digital technology in particular.

Research on sustainability must take into account both the need to create a sustainable world and the urgency of undertaking a radical rethinking of our approach to planning and foresight that encompasses a full understanding of the ineludible unpredictability of the complex systems we are dealing with, which can only come about through long-term inter/multi/transdisciplinary educational processes. Those calling for a “culture of sustainability” need to become aware of the systemic and relational dimensions that characterize all processes and dynamics of reality and of the ecosystems we are endeavoring to inhabit. What this signifies is that a culture of sustainability is a culture of complexity. Complex systems are exclusively living systems, whose intrinsic unpredictability cannot be managed, predicted, or controlled by technology. The misleading idea that technology is our only pathway to sustainability is part of the “great mistake” we are making today: the belief that the solution to every contemporary problem is an accelerated combination of digital and technical skills, obtainable through a predominantly applicational form of education based on simulation, velocity, and connectivity, which teaches competences and know-how rather than stimulating what is so direly needed today: the capacity for reflective knowledge and critical thinking.

Within a world-system characterized by processes and dynamics whose interconnections and interdependencies increase exponentially each day, we are passing through an extremely delicate and complex phase of global mutation. What we are witnessing is a radical overturn of the complex interaction between natural (biological) and cultural evolution. The ongoing paradigm shift and profound anthropological transformation create new dimensions, openings, epistemological implications that require new thinking and new thought, as well as different approaches and methods. We are the constitutive elements of a “new” Nature, from a structural, ontological and substantial point of view, in need of a New Humanism that must re-define certain categories (humanity, identity, dignity, Person, values, rights, etc.) in order to succeed in rethinking “being human” within a renewed and complex relationship with the ecosystems. The grand illusions of the hypertechnological civilization: rationality, control, measurability, predictability, and elimination of error; are reinforced systematically by the carte blanche delegated to technique/technology, reintroducing reductionist and deterministic approaches, analyses and explanations, exclusively based on technical knowledge and skills: that is, those which are guaranteed to best support precisely these very illusions. It is precisely this attitude which prevents us from being prepared, which dooms us to an eternal apprehension of black swans, little aware that our very lives are emergency; that they are infinite sequences of black swans. The present-day obsession with doing, designing, studying, and funding only what is “useful,” the insistent search for control and certainty in order to cling onto an illusory sensation of familiarity and reassurance in the face of the radical unpredictability and variability inherent to life and reality (“tyranny of concreteness”). With the advent of artificial intelligence, it has become of the utmost importance to reflect upon the relationship/interaction between man and machine, and the dangers posed by pursuing the simulation of human thought.