“Newspapers should devote at least two pages tocritical site analysis, just as teachers should teach kids to use websites to write essays”. To say it is Umberto Eco, during a meeting with journalists in the Aula Magna of the Cavallerizza Reale in Turin, after being awarded an honorary degree in "Communication and Media Culture".
The semiotician and writer, born in Alessandria, returns to the hot topic of the reliability of the web which, more and more often, is found to be the megaphone that ensures the diffusion of false news: according to Eco, newspapers must begin "to filter internet information with a team of specialists because nobody is able to understand today if a site is reliable”.
To improve information, therefore, there needs to be "editorial control" also extended to the Internet which, according to the semiologist and writer, suffers from a long-standing problem, that of social media which "give the right to speak to legions of imbeciles who previously only spoke at the bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. They were immediately silenced, while now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of imbeciles".
“If TV had promoted the village idiot over whom the viewer felt superior, ithe drama of The Internet is that it has promoted the village idiot into a truth-bearer”. A drama which, cAs said, it can only be stemmed through selection, the ability of the cultural industry to promote reliable contents over those that are not. A difficult operation, certainly, but it is worth trying.
As regards the future of printed paper, Eco does not join the Cassandre chorus, on the contrary: “There is a return to paper. US companies that have lived and triumphed on the internet have bought newspapers (the most obvious reference is to the founder and CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos). This tells me that there is a future, the newspaper will not disappear at least for the years that I am allowed to live. Even more so in the age of the internet in which the conspiracy syndrome is rampant and hoaxes proliferate”.
