Sixth appointment of the series of meetings that the Municipality dedicates to citizens on the topics of Communication, Civic Education, Italian language and new media. After "Casa Petrarca Lab," the review has changed its name (becoming "Figline and Incisa Lab") and location and is divided between Figline City Hall and the Praetorian Palace. From April to June, various speakers will be talking about "Media and Society: vices and virtues of the Net"(download the full program).
On Tuesday, June 6, at 9 p.m. at the "Francesco Staderini" hall of Figline City Hall (Piazza IV Novembre, free admission), there will be a discussion on "From posters to digital marketing: advertising is done (also) online," with Laura Ottina of IED (European Institute of Design, Fashion and Visual Arts) and Gianluca Torrini (Sowhat agency); journalist Chiara Baglioni will moderate the meeting.
The "Figline and Incisa Lab" project is part of a path that the municipality is sharing with schools to promote a digital culture. Being young in the time of social media, in fact, means not being able to imagine a world "without" it. Without internet connection, without wifi, without smartphones, without PCs or tablets. But it also means benefiting, compared to the previous generation, from an IT advantage: being digital natives. A "biological" advantage that leads one to believe that, when it comes to computing, the young and very young have nothing to learn but, on the contrary, can turn into doc teachers, especially with respect to the over age groups.
There is one thing, however: knowing how to use digital tools does not make one immune to the dangers of the Web. And the daily news stories prove it: from street bullying to online bullying, from barroom chatter (often unfounded) to the spread of fake news by tweeting and sharing, which whip up controversy and fuel urban legends, and even touching on peaks of verbal violence and hatred that perhaps, offline, one would have a harder time manifesting.
How do you get out of it? By staking everything on the very generation that technically has nothing to learn. And that is how a collaboration between the municipality and secondary schools (first and second grade) in the area is starting, in a formative and educational key. The goal is to start a path of promoting digital culture to those who already use digital tools (students in the first place, but also parents and professors), to teach them that everything that ends up online has consequences (positive or negative) on real life. Fake news has it, which can be unmasked by verifying its source, and hate language has it, which often hits as hard as a punch in the stomach. It will be a path to be built all together, in which no one is excluded, in which everyone will be able to make their knowledge available: kids, parents, teachers and institutions united to promote digital culture.