“Fake News, Cognitive Pollution and Environmental Awareness”

Fake news and trolling are usually perceived as aggressive forms of communication, unsettling and falsifying our perception of reality; they are the trendy topics of most discourses on media, the target of today witch-hunt, the new villains in a post digital scenario where fact checking has become the superhero that will save us, and restore ‘the Truth’. This essay pursues the idea that, within our new media eco-systems, fake news, trolling – as well as other forms of unethical pseudo-communication – are but the updated version of the age-old idea of mythmaking, something that we can better navigate through the rediscovering of literature as a probing tool and not simply as a subject, as per the teachings of the Toronto School of Communication. Fake News is a growing tree, with roots in Classic mythmaking and branches spreading across a complex inter-media scenario that affects our way of being humans (or trans-humans), as well as our way of inhabiting our hyper-realities.