Il ‘branco confuso’ e la (post)verità di tutti

This article addresses the relation between reality and communication, specifically the ways that media construct representations of reality and favour the spreading of different alternative forms of truths, usually named post-truth, understood as opposing and replacing institutional and scientific verities. This attitude of media is somehow implicit in the nature of media communication and its relation with the collective knowledge and symbolic universe of people; media aim to persuade but, together, manifest the deep feelings, beliefs and values of the social communities. On the other hand, new media intensify this epistemic effect, by allowing anybody to expand his own beliefs and convictions, so creating a dark zone of the communication where any rational or scientific requirement is revoked in favour of uncontrolled and opaque intuitions and emotions, including the disquieting features of the dogmatic thought. In this sense, media may provide the rhetoric and pragmatic tools and the virtual places for conspirative myths. The article investigates the fundamental cognitive and pragmatic mechanisms of media, highlighting their close relation with the shared social knowledge and analyses some conspirative messages in the political discourse of the right and left extreme positions, of which it evidences the irrational and delegitimizing nature.