Conference Program

As the call for papers reminds us, the rapid platformization of society, algorithmic personalization, and the growth of media-driven information have changed our approach to information. These changes have affectedboth our strategies and traditional teaching systems. Education remains a key place to develop skills needed for navigating complex and epistemic-instable information environments. However, these skills requireconstant revision. 

Based on data collected through structured interviews conducted as part of a European Erasmus+ project on digital literacy and disinformation (DRONE Project), this contribution aims to shed light on the waysadolescents address disinformation for the way it results from interviews and the possible factors that influence it. Among these, family capital appears to be one of the most important factors: interviews with adolescents reveal the essential role of parents, particularly mothers, in addressing and managing disinformation. In addition, the interviews show that young people do not trust teachers very much and, on the contrary, trust their parents if they have a problem related to information/disinformation: they seek guidance, even if they often do not turn to their parents because they are aware of their low level of digital literacy. However, despite this, from the interviews with parents another important finding emerges, not in opposition to but rather consistent with the above: the level of education of parents and their adoption of comparative thinkingtend to influence the level of critical thinking of adolescents and, therefore, their approach to disinformation. Although with due caution and considering all the possible factors that may influence this relationship, the positive correlation between family capital and the level of disinformation among adolescents could serve as a good starting point for building educational and informational resilience practices, beginning with the family, which is often overlooked in digital literacy programs. This resilience strategy, which extends from family to children, could also benefit from a reverse educational approach: from adolescents to parents, as the former, in some cases, have more skills that can be combined with those of their parents. This dialogical educational process and the building of a resilient community should necessarily include schools and teachers. As the DRONE project and interviews demonstrate, there is a lack of teaching related to digital literacy and the same skills among teachers, which generates mistrust of teachers and schools among adolescents.