The quality in Internet: Luca De Biase at TEDxLakeComo

Yes, I'm a journalist. And I declare myself "not guilty", although suspected. I'm also an Italian citizen, and I'd like to know what the facts are exactly. Plus, as they said, I love TED. I'm all for TED, for Media Lab, for all those many (or too few) places where information, inspiration, examples from extraordinary people, all come together. And there are organizers, like those who worked on TEDxLakeComo, with a taste for these things. And then there's the most important thing: an audience that makes you feel at home, that have these thoughts that it almost seems like you've known them forever. As an Italian citizen, this is definitely not my usual experience. Indeed, I have to tell, I'd like to know what the facts are, but I absolutely don't know how other people think they'll discover the way the things are. As a journalist, my job is to tell you what's going on: the mud in Genua, the mud of financial markets, the mud of all those stories we've been telling each other for years, stories that are linked with the ongoing facts, and much more with how we see and think about them. To put these three identities together, which we all are living, I have three questions and an answer. These three questions come from a series of facts that happened to me in a recent, extraordinary moment of my life. I was invited to talk at Media Lab, the MIT's think tank in Cambridge, MA. They asked to share my experience in a research about new media: I did, and they were all happy, students, professors, PhDs, listened to me, posed questions. Then, once it was all over, one by one, they all came along and asked more or less the same question: why Italians don't rebel? (Applause) For a rebellion to take place, many conditions are necessary: one of them is, you've got to know who are you going to rebel with, to achieve what, based on what diagnosis and which shared knowledge: we can do it,guys at Media Lab asked me this question because they thought, as we're close to Tunisia, we just might have done like them. They are not communist, they are Americans! But their approach is, when a given situation must change, you've got to do something. To do that, according to us, in our experience, you need to feel part of a group, to do that. During the last ten days I learned the analysis seen and told by a Professor Dan Kahan, in Yale, who defines a particularly serious social condition, similar with the one we know very well. He calls it "cognitively illiberal state", a state of things which is illiberal from the cognitive standpoint. How's this state like? It's a state of things where the difference in values, ideologies, ways to see and evaluate facts, is so big that in a society there's no different way to know how things really are without the risk that this request is interpreted as an opinion, a position: you just cannot talk about a given fact without making other people think you're supporting an ideological viewpoint or another. Cognitively illiberal state. If we think of ourselves as a peaceful and happy democracy, we won't rebel, but if we depict our country as an illiberal, cognitively dictatorial one, then a form of protest can be set up, meeting ourselves. Meeting ourselves is the third issue: I feel that all we have done with social networks, the Internet, blogs, facebook, was just great: it forced us to reconsider all the media system! The journalist in me has spent these last ten years confronting with an extremely capable, new, and creative subject which was this active audience that has contributed to information, criticized it, spread it, made it relevant and has become an extremely important subject to deal with. But it's not clear how different social groups meet on social networks. Platforms, now, are actually supporting these fast ways to connect, they valorize the fast way we use to connect and acknowledge each other. And things roll out fast because it's easy to agree each other. This dynamics emerges more or less everywhere and, essentially, makes us all meet likewise people. Groups and still separated cultural islands emerge (as in the cognitively illiberal state), where cultural clichés matter, or ideological positions, activism, goals to achieve, whatever. It's not always like this, and this is not created by the Internet: it's just some practices that in this phase of Internet's development are prevailing. Of course it's not all like this: as Frieda Brioschi showed us, Wikipedia is a project where all contributors manage and produce something together. I'm talking about other platforms, like facebook or twitter, where likewise people can easily and rapidly meet. We're so used to meet likewise people, that we're not aware of some striking differences in our society. According to me the most striking discover was one reported by Wikipedia Italy too with data on illiteracy in Italy, functional illiteracy: people who can't understand a newspaper's content, when reading. They were tested on reading and comprehension abilities. And maybe they decipher what the written symbols mean, but don't understand what the whole text means. And the number of people in italy who are functionalli illiterate according to a research by OCSE and ONU is 47%. No other western country scores so poorly. I don't know you, but I don't know anyone of them. My personal world spins around people who read much. People with a rich, sophisticated “media diet”, with Internet, newspapers, books, even a little tv! (Laughter) Yet almost half of us doesn't understand what's written. And.. sorry: tests were performed, in Italy, on a sport newspaper (Laughter). Forty seven per cent. According to Tullio De Mauro, the figure is even higher, but he's a very hard grader: he looked at the book provided by ISTAT to those who interview Italians about their reading frequency. And he has discovered that when a person replies: “No, I read no books” the interviewer is supposed to ask back: “Not even a cookbook?” and so those who replied "No, i read no books" admits: “Well, yes,a cookbook.” So Tullio De Mauro thinks it's even worse than that, but 47% is already enough for me. What do these observations, these conditions we're in, bring us to say? There's this great opportunity, the Internet. Great openness, great participation, great innovative energy. There's a divided landscape, in our society, so that I don't know anyone in this half of population that don't understand what they read, if they read at all. And there's a condition where ideology, the difference in values, separates us so much that the plain facts just can't be known because they're always presented as supporting a given position. Last example (but please, get furious with me): there's been a debate, in both Tuscany and Veneto, on the opportunity of giving up with this damn weather forecasts, because when they foresee a bad weather, less tourists go visit art cities. Even the weather forecast has become an opinion. That's the condition we're in! (Laughter) (Applause) But the Internet is also a big opportunity. Not really because, “as it is”, works and fixes everything. The Internet is a big opportunity because it continuously feeds the chance to innovate, to add another brick to the path we're on. And remember, it's still a very short path: we didn't meet the Internet so long ago. In 1995, only 100,000 people were connected in Italy; now, in 2011, more than 50% of Italians is, according to the Censis. By the way, this is also the year when for the first time four referendum succeded despite a lousy TV coverage, and a continuous decline in newspapers' sales, discarded by most people. And all the analysts agree that 55% of those Italians who voted, acquired informations through the web. Internet is important, and can be improved. The suggestion I leave you with, in the last 3 minutes and 44 seconds, is about a foundation born in Trento, in a big district of research, that aims to add pieces of innovations to Internet encouraging the behaviour of those who give information on the web, in oirder to have a common method to define what's information and what's not. This foundation is called ahref, because it's the part of the html code the standard language for web pages, that part that precedes the hyperlinks. So every hyperlink starts with an ahref, even if the browser hides it to us. The foundation of links. One of the things they've done was launching this platform, called Timu, that means “team, let's team” in Swahili, and citizens who produce the information, on all kind of media are asked to join there. It is open to organizations, foundations, companies that want to investigate something, local authorities who want to support those citizens who are investigating. But on Timu, they all agree to inform using a shared method. Really simple, something like: I'll provide an accurate information, transparently declaring my conflicts of interest,if any, and why am I doing these things. I declare I'll respect the law, and check the sources. A method that enables citizens to declare in an open way, a way to inform, so that those who read what the other citizens produce, read and get informed with what is produced there, might at least know what their intentions were. there's no other way to make this system work but by taking spontaneously charge of the responsability that citizens take to give information. An accurate, transparent information, one that checks the sources and is oriented to respect the law. But if you declare this explicitly, you take a responsibility towards the others, which in turn will assume you're willing to take this responsibility, and you end up meeting other citizens on a different level, where before debating on opinions, an arrangement is made on how facts can be discovered. I think this could help us. (Applause)