Summary
About the "post-truths", we are still reasoning along theoretical-practical logics of emergency and control. We need to analyse the social-cultural factors, the environment and ecosystems’ aspects, the dynamics of social nets pre-existent to digital ones. These are variables that should be integrated. The problems are people, their being easily hetero-directed to the "subjection taught through cultural habituation". These issues regard modern democracies and the quality of democracy itself.The “real” problems are not the fake news and the post-truths, but the people,
the citizens, their being easily conditioned, their hetero-direction and “predisposition”
-- socially and culturally “constructed” through education and socialization
processes – to conformism and/or to “subjection taught through cultural
habituation”, as Etienne de La Boétie (1549-1576) would have put it.
The problem is, has been and continues to be the same: there is so much discussion,
more and more frequent and insistent – and the issues raised, inherent to
the digital revolution and the sharing society (Dominici,1996), to information
and the sharing/distribution of information and knowledge, in terms of emergency
management, using more or less sophisticated and complex “instruments”
and “applications” (algorithms, platforms etc.), other than through laws and deontological
codes, guidelines, declarations – are designed to orient, guide and
direct readers, listeners, TV spectators, internauts, citizens, but also the journalists
and communicators themselves. With an approach that is halfway between
technological determinism and legal positivism.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
With regards to both the so-called “fake news” (or the socalled
fact-checking) and the so-called “post-truths” (debunking) - (let it be clear
that this is yet another age-old concept/theme passed off as original or “newlycoined”)
- my opinion is that we are still reasoning along theoretical-practical
lines whose framework is solely and unendingly limited to the logics of emergency
and total control, (and in fact, with respect to information, what is under
discussion includes censorship) with the consequential exclusive involvement of
the standard fields of knowledge and competences. It goes without saying that
these are important strategic dimensions that must be dealt with in depth; however,
constantly and consistently centering the analyses, process management,
and the individuation of possible solutions solely around the “instruments”, the
media, their technological “nature” and the judicial and economic dimensions,
means never taking into account, as would be needed, the social and cultural
factors, the aspects regarding environment and ecosystems, the characteristics
and dynamics typical of social nets – pre-existent to digital net(work)s, to the
web and to the social networks themselves. Typical variables of social, relational
and communicative complexity that should be integrated into a critical and systemic
approach to such hypercomplexity.
