Il mito tra verità e post-verità / Myth Between Truth and Post-Truth

While offering effective tools for information and content sharing, the Web 2.0 has also fomented disinformation and misinformation, emerging as a hybrid space where official data and verified news increasingly tend to “merge” with a variety of alternative narratives, more or less reliable accounts and even real fake news. In this context, the concept of myth, traditionally associated with the idea of truth, has been widely used to refer to the illusory or false characterization of contemporary digital narratives, and the consequent need to debunk them. This connotation is not new at all, but dates back to early modernity and, more generally, to the long-standing debate on the relationship between logical-rational thought and other forms of knowledge. However, the development of new communication technologies has made it spread on a large scale, imposing it in common sense. This paper deals with such issues, in the aim to contribute to the philosophical and semiotic reflection on the relationship between truth and post-truth and on the role of the mythic discourse as a cognitive and hermeneutic device.