Television has become a fundamental linguistic workshop. It had a unique unifying power. If and when the digital divide is ever bridged, the Internet will not have the same power: on the web, what you choose (better what you are chosen from) is much more diverse, vast, diversified, and therefore just as diverse. , extensive and varied. Diverse worlds created in the network. Can the multiplication of identities be caused by something else besides the disintegration of taboos and roles, besides the discovery of fluidity? Maybe. One candidate is language. We know that a thing exists if and only if you give it a name. Recently, however, more and more often it happens that the name of a thing becomes a phenomenon. New Yorker the other day he was talking about the “-ification of everything”: kardashification, genzification, Hitlerification, awakening. Italian grammar refers to nominalization as the process by which a name becomes a verbal predicate or adjective. The -ification he talks about in the New Yorker is over-nominalization: everything becomes a trend. So it turns out that if a more or less constant number of influencers refer to Kim Kardashian’s aesthetic, we are talking about the Kardashification of modern aesthetics and that aesthetics forge (or so it is believed) identity. This is a rather risky step, which also leads to sociological alarmism, an ancient but evergreen vice: to see in everything a manifestation, a phenomenology, a symptom. In addition, this process weakens the words. The thing ceases to be what it is and begins to point to a trend that does not exist in principle.
In an article titled “Generation Z Drop” published in the online magazine Doppiozero, Simone Zanello described the phenomenon of the “significant spread of the English suffix -core”: Traumacore, Weirdcore, Mumblecore, Gorpcore, Bimbocore, Fairycore, Goblincore. , Dreamcore , Emptycore (much longer list). Zanello writes: “In the ‘late’ age of the Internet, the juxtaposition of the term and the suffix -core is an operation that can be anything but not without consequences: there is a real generative intensity of the -core, the ability to build worlds. , universes and imaginaries, as well as to set in motion the mechanisms of social recognition, communication and symbolic connection between subjects. In the same way, identities are born: from the craving for nominalization, which, in essence, is the need for unification.