Piergaetano Marchetti, president of RCS, dedicated his speech at the opening ceremony of the Bocconi academic year to a highly topical issue: how information changes, and more generally our society and our democracy, in the it was from the internet. Having said all the positive things that must be said about the affirmation of digital communication, the drive towards participation, and above all the transparency it is giving all over the world, Marchetti did not hold back in emphasizing some ambiguities inherent in the way the company operates network, and some serious problems that it poses, first of all that of not entering into conflict with the freedom of individuals, with their right to privacy.
The merits of the digital age are there for all to see. The Internet offers a new space for free communication to millions of citizens who in this way can actively participate in public life, express the sacrosanct need for transparency towards the institutions, monitor the work of the political authorities minute by minute, thus giving a fuller and more fully to the exercise of democracy.
But there is also a flip side. The virtuous circle of the diffusion of information on the net can turn negative if the tendency to speak rather than listen prevails, if populist and provocative messages prevail which excite individuals to a total refusal of the authorities, to a suspected conspiracy theorist, or even only to unrestrained muttering and therefore to the spread of slander against which the individual who is hit has no way of defending himself. Marchetti quotes Rossini's Barber in this regard: "slander is a breeze...".
A great American journalist, perhaps a little too skeptical of information from below, of the abolition of any professional mediation, said that "the web has given new respectability to uninformed opinion". And in fact, if you circulate a bit on social networks, you can see how difficult it is to separate truly qualified information (even if not shareable for this) from the mass of sensations not based on factual data, but on vague hearsay or worse, on fragments of old ideologies sailing in a sea of clichés. In this internet it is often linked with the television broadcasters which tend to favor the show, i.e. the exaggerations, compared to the more calm understanding of the facts and the systematic investigation on the consequences, often in the long term, of the decisions taken on the spur of emotions that they tend to excite the darker sides of our psyche.
These dangers certainly cannot be tackled with a state intervention that imposes limits and obligations, thus limiting freedom of expression, but it is important that we begin to talk about them so as to make all internet users understand that in order to navigate in a sea endless information and opinions you need a compass, you need honest and professional intermediaries, able to gain trust on the basis of their reliability. And that therefore a certain piece of information, even if it is online, must be able to be paid for. "Free" must be able to say freedom, but not gratuity. An evolution that seems to be just beginning and that will only be accomplished with an increased spontaneous awareness of the many surfers who try to get information on the net. They are facing a real revolution. And as we know, revolutions in their initial phase experience a moment of great creativity and vitality. But then we need to find more suitable structures to consolidate the conquest of new spaces of freedom. The need to have a selection of reliable and highly qualified information is a need increasingly felt by people, while many publishers are starting to move by restructuring their offer to comply with these new needs.
