Democratic community on the net

Fake news as an epistemic problem and pedagogical responsibility

Abstract

The article examines the risks of digital coexistence, which makes the virtual community a sort of tribal village, albeit a global one, having little in common with the educating spirit of the inclusive, and personalistic community, which is bent on the sacredness of the person. After having explored the community/comunità dichotomy, and after having unveiled the elements that set the distance between the global village and a democratic community, open and plural, where different opinions coexist as in an ancient Athenian agora, primary nucleus of the Western democracy, this article questions a typical phenomenon of online coexistence, namely the phenomenon of fake news, proposing a series of cultural hypotheses. The author’s thesis is that fake news is an epistemic and hermeneutic question that challenges pedagogical responsibility. Interpreting the load of daily information, knowing how to read the news and, if necessary, identify the false ones to ignore them, without being swallowed up by them, means exercising a critical spirit in a complex and connected society: this appears to be a great pedagogical challenge in the contemporary digital community.