In the globalization of a world that has suddenly suspended all its contacts, technology comes to the aid. We have smartphones, PCs, video calling systems. We are connected even if we are alone. We hear friends, relatives, information enters our homes. So why are we sometimes so irrational as not to use intelligently these means that modernity has given us? For example when it comes to fake news?
Coronavirus and liquid society
We should feel luckier than those of our predecessors who have truly experienced isolation throughout history. Times when going to quarantine meant not only barricading oneself in one's own homes, or other suitable places, but also being completely alone. There weren't those powerful means of communication that we have today. No radios or TVs or phones. The news circulated as slow as people's movements were. Today we have speeded up, perhaps too much, so much so that sometimes the speed of sharing exceeds that of reasoning.
Anyone who knows the great Bauman he should know. The Polish philosopher who spoke so much of liquid society as a definition of modern times. The contemporary age is made up of short distances and times. We can be in touch anytime and anywhere we want. An interesting potential that however becomes "risky" if intelligence is not used. One click is enough, sometimes not even that, and the news enters our phones. Maybe without even looking for them. And so the information, whether true or false, runs wild. A speed that crushes the time of waiting. Where certainties and points of reference are blurred even in an educated and advanced society like ours. There is a flaw in this system through which irrationality finds a way out. And then, taken by the eager desire to spread as much as we can, we stumble upon ourselves.
We divulge messages, recordings and all the other files that are bouncing from one smartphone to another these days. And it's not about satire. Posts, cartoons and themed songs certainly help the spirit, if well done. But no, here we are talking about fake news. You hate buffaloes, to put it in the Italian way. Like the one on vitamin C which would be enough to not make us sick. Or the story of the helicopters that would circulate at night to carry out disinfestation works. All ready to pick up clothes hanging and various pets! Can we really share these things? Believe they are true? What excuses do we have today to justify promoting this kind of "news"? We are in a liquid society with its pros and cons. We have made great discoveries over time. Medicine has made great strides, education is no longer just for the rich. So what's wrong?
Between old and new fake news
When illiteracy was a rampant fact, when science did not know the existence of viruses and bacteria, then perhaps a primitive thought was somehow legitimized. Yet man learned to observe. He understood that social aggregation favored contagion and without too much medical knowledge he decreed isolation. Of course they wanted to find a reason for the disease and so they spread theories. That it was divine punishment was the most quoted motivation. Then there were some freaks, some quite singular. Like that story, during the plague of the seventeenth century, for which the disease was caused by infected sandwiches spread here and there by the French. A real fake news even for the time! Which combined people's ignorance with a political question, that of the 30 Years War.
Today something like this makes us smile. Or maybe someone would believe us with the right Whatsappata. We laugh at our ancestors, at their having believed in unthinkable stories. And we, who feel “so modern” and learned, why do we contribute to spreading news without foundation? Magari someone will remember it. At the beginning of this whole affair, when the Coronavirus it seemed to belong only to Wuhan, the "conspiracy theory" sought its space. "The Americans are said to have spread the virus in China." This story looks a bit like that hoax about the French, during the plague of the 600s. Yet centuries separate us! Are we perhaps involuting?
Fake news: an insult to intelligence
The word has always been a powerful weapon that has met with a strong echo over time. The murmuring of the people, the newspapers, the radio and the TV. Then internet in the company of PCs and phones last generation. Perhaps all these tools have confused us a little. So let's go back to using intelligence first. The one that makes us free to understand.
# Italian in the heart
