Mediawar, la rappresentazione mediale della tecnologia nel conflitto come dimensione identitaria in prospettiva media-educativa

[Autom. eng. transl.] In his editorial in the special edition of the EAS magazine "War in the classroom" Pier Cesare Rivoltella recalls the importance of telling the war to children and young people in schools. Telling the war in the classroom so as not to leave the story only to the media space but try to stimulate a critical approach to news and images, so as not to let the conflict become just another element of flow and simplification. Taking up this stimulus, we asked ourselves about an aspect of the media representation of the conflict that is increasingly emerging in the contemporary media scenario, the digital dimension. The narrative of the conflict, in fact, unfolds in what David Bolter has defined the Digital Plenitude, in which everything seems to disintermediate and place itself on the same level without distinction between true and likely, high and low fees, competent and non-competent. In this scenario we are questioned by the media representation of technology in the conflict, a representation which, although starting from military analyzes of the forces at stake, tends to construct a new categorization, perhaps the only possibility of representing the different in the Bolterian Plenitude, belonging or exclusion from the world of digital technology and networks. The us versus them becomes an axiology not only of good versus evil, but of digital good versus analogue and obsolete evil. Manuel Castells, in his work analyzing the advent of the digital age, points out how the structural inability of the Soviet system to adapt to the flexibility and speed of the digital was one of the causes of the decline and, in the end, the collapse of the USSR ; this dimension seems to be re-proposed now as a key to narrating the conflict. In the media representation of the war in Ukraine, we quickly moved from the narration of Russian "hacker attacks" to the story of a "Soviet" army, made up of vehicles from the 1970s, involved in a war that "looks like World War II" , "Back on technology", a "Russia that wants to leave the Internet", opposed by a Ukrainian resistance that has passed from Molotov cocktails and from Kalashnikovs in the hands of civilians to hybridized weapons with digital technology such as drones, Javelin missiles, "Digital surveillance of the battlefield", the "facial recognition of enemies". One can also read in this sense the decision of Meta, a company par excellence symbol of the "modern web", to take sides in favor of Ukraine, suspending the hate speech policies and providing technological opportunities for Ukrainians. Likewise, he actively took sides against the Russia the Anonymous movement, uniting on the same side - that of digital technology - the symbols par excellence of the giants of the Web and digital hacktivism, often positioned on opposite sides. It should be remembered that in Italy, albeit with some exceptions overexposed, the Russian invasion is accompanied by general media, political and cultural support for Ukrainians from a moral, human and even military solidarity point of view; in the Italian camp a similar situation had arisen during the war in Kosovo (1999) and the NATO intervention. In the research proposed below we have focused our attention on the representation of the technology used by the conflicting parties to verify the hypothesis that the emerging narrative is that of a contrast between a "good" party, who lives together with "us" in the digital world contemporary, and a "bad" part, which comes from the Soviet analogue past and that it no longer belongs to our world. It is necessary to question the validity of this representation. The research consists of two phases: the first is Fr.