Digital literacy in the brave new e-sphere: How to survive in an ocean of false information?

One of the messages of Huxley’s Brave New World is the alarm against the dangers of technology and the control of society through the manipulation of information. The social circulation of false information is not recent; it’s part of the history of the media. Despite the mission of journalism to seek and report the truth, false information already proliferated before the social media. However, the social media give a new impulse to false information, attracting and influencing public opinion. Notwithstanding the noble social functions of journalism in informing, clarifying, and socializing, McLuhan warned of the opposite effects in “Culture Without Literacy” (1953). Warning about situations of falsehood, omission, lies or manipulation that now proliferate in the e-sphere, a new networked virtual public sphere (where we immerse ourselves online in connectivity and interactivity with immanence and immediacy), McLuhan called for the care in interpreting media messages. This is an escalated and reconfigured problem with the Internet. According to Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, we are in a universe in which there is more and more information and less and less meaning. The care in interpreting mass media and social media messages is emerging, imposing the need for a new literacy and citizenship in this new digital public sphere. With the new technological means of communication and their multiple uses and effects, the concept of literacy changes, becomes more comprehensive and becomes a practical and necessary capacity to participate in the public sphere. This is demonstrated by the journalistic projects of fact-checking, whose objective is to ascertain the truth of the messages that circulate in the public sphere. It is no longer enough the journalists to produce news; it is necessary to verify facts and separate them from false information. Media literacy promotes critical thinking skills with which citizens can independently and conscientiously choose content, i.e. choose the program, the media or the way to interpret the information received. Media literacy is more difficult when the messages are ideological, rhetorical or with implicit content. In these cases, it is imperative to identify: the significant facts/events in the news; the causes of events and journalistic criteria; the connections between events and agents and their consequences; the information included and omitted; the choices of words and images (denotative or connotative) presented or shared; the order of narration of the facts; the presentation of direct speech or points of view. With media and digital literacy, it is possible for citizens to recognize whether (and how) the media are used to (dis)encourage debate based on false, distorted, or hidden information. Media and digital literacies are as one and are an important democratic instrument in the public sphere, especially in this digital age of online. By questioning the contribution of journalistic literacy in the new virtual configuration of the public sphere, we will be better able to discern what is true from what is false. As fake news is not easy to identify, media and digital literacy is basic knowledge about the new technological nature of media and how they work. Following a theoretical and conceptual approach based on the example of the journalistic model of fact-checking, this new imposition is discussed as a practice of promoting literacy, citizenship, and democracy in the e-sphere. The objectives are to understand the repercussions of this new dimension of communication in the digital age and to recognize fake news and disinformation in the digital environment as obstacles to the modern public sphere and to media literacy, in order to survive in our new ocean of false information.