Democracy at Risk

I met Kevin Spacey in Ravello where he was shooting a movie about Al Gore a little over a month ago. At that moment he was probably the most popular actor in the world. It's practically gone now. There's no more agent and press office, expulsion from Netflix (his character perhaps at the House of Cards series will die), until a movie about Paul Getty interpreting will undo new scenes belonging to another actor instead.

Everything on the bow of just a few weeks. As a result of Kevin Spacey's having sexually molested young people on numerous occasions in life. Everything within a wonderful media campaign opened in the case of American producer Harvey Weinstein versus sexual abuse and harassment. Last time I was in Barcelona, I found it to be one of the quietest, most solarly delicious cities on the planet.

And now we know how chaotic the situation is, with the city and Catalonian in permanent religion, with large companies having their own headquarters and with the Spanish state almost on a war uniform in the territory. Everything in a few months. Both the Catalans and the central state have resulted in a demand for independence. Two events happen that at first sight seem to have no ratio between them.

That is what each of you will think after reading the first lines of this article. And my thesis is actually that we can't be sure about this mutual contact. Perhaps a relationship is made up of what is called in English mobocrace (Mobocracy), meaning mob power. Now, mb It's the English word that's used for our Mafia, organized crime, but it's also meant for a mob to threaten. In the video games jar, mb However, even small monsters, referring to various enemies required to be eliminated during the development of a video. And it's where the monstrous invasion that in my opinion refers to two seemingly different events like the case of sexual harassment and Catalan revolt.

My discussion, to be aware, is not about content: sexual harassment is shameful and, not necessarily, in the present form, people have a right to self-deception. The problem is that of looking for a different connection between two events, of the kind: how can public opinion change, sometimes even in a staggering way, in the bow of a few hours?

I believe the answer is the way social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Titter influence people systematically, by being excited and the duke radicalized their deepest feelings. It already happens quite regularly in politics. The “paper The Economist” of last week was titled “The threat to social networks for democracy”. And we know about the suspicions of foreign influence, especially Russia, of Trump's campaign.

But the problem is more general, and it helps explain a lot of rising opinions from Arab Spring to Brex. But the fact is not only about great politics, but also about everyday reactions and perceptions of reality. What social networks do from this point of view is they contact people with strong opinions, but not necessarily based on evidence in their entirety, and who want to see these confirmed opinions, not tested.

Insulting, overreacting, radicalisation, extremism are the most widely used rhetorical forms for this type of operation. The result consists of creating unexpected discontinuities and strong public opinion changes. Like the actor and the region we started from. But even by calmly accepting the ethical profile of the new impacts related to them, there is no way to keep absorption of the huge differences that affect people's lives so dramatically so rapidly.

The risk of substance in the phenomenon is obvious. Public opinion, which is the basis of democracy, also needs time, discretion, and reflection to be reasonable. When this does not happen, then we have a deep problem for the public sphere and for representative democracy, whose quality depends precisely on the sound functioning of the public sphere.

(Empty: Il Messagero), World Translation.al