IT HAPPENED TOMORROW Our Challenge: Digital Dementia

By Guido Vitale*

Jewish State of the Net, the journalism course our newspaper is organizing this spring in Turin, will cover issues raised by digital dementia and the misuses of social media (including astroturfing and sockpuppetting). This is a problem of major relevance for all of Italian society, which is increasingly beset by the maneuvering of political consensus by “sock puppeteers”. However, it also affects the Italian Jewish world, which often struggles to counter such spurious campaigns with effective, credible and sophisticated reporting and information.
In their two millennia of history, Italian Jews have shown that at the cost of great sacrifice it is possible to overcome the worst difficulties and to secure our future. Openly discussing the destructive tendencies of those who use the internet to spread poison and madness, is the major challenge of our time.

*Guido Vitale is the editor-in-chief of Pagine Ebraiche.