How to debate national identity in real life and on social media

Thanks to the widespread diffusion of the Internet, the last few decades have been characterized by the growing importance of social media. Furthermore, phenomena such as globalization, gender studies, economic crises, climate change and migration flows have raised doubts regarding traditional identities and have favored the formation of different representations of individuals and communities. A specific intersection of the aforementioned trends is the conceptualization of national identity by users of social media, a topic with implications in various thematic areas, for instance the functioning of the Internet (including algorithms), its most dangerous communicative and cognitive dysfunctions (such as fake news and post-truth), the role of debate and the right to citizenship. The paper aims not only to reflect theoretically on the matter, but also to elaborate a multidisciplinary didactic proposal based on an inductive approach and addressed to upper secondary school students, who are likely to show interest in those issues: in addition to using social media and living in multicultural societies, they may study subjects such as law and philosophy and may start developing a social conscience. The goals of the project are to teach participants how to write on social media and to enable them to acquire critical thinking by analyzing authentic texts and pictures and debating constructively both in real life and online. In other words, the students are expected both to manage the semiotic complexity of social media and to carry out debates on fundamental subjects regarding civic education by not simply expressing their own opinions, but also acknowledging their opponents as interlocutors worth respecting and listening to. The paper is threefold in structure. The first part provides the theoretical framework: after explaining the main features of social media, it takes into consideration the most common representations of Italians and foreigners promoted in the media over the years. The second part analyzes two Facebook posts and their associated comments focusing on the label of “Italian”. The case studies prove to be particularly suitable for designing two learning units, which are sketched in the third part. The didactic activities fulfil two main objectives: firstly, they raise awareness of the importance of an ethical and effectively communicative use of social media, especially when debating (Mastroianni, 2017; Gheno and Mastroianni, 2020; Mastroianni, 2020); secondly, they problematize the concepts of national identity and of citizenship by showing the models of integration and the citizenship laws adopted in some multicultural societies (Colombo, 2011). References Colombo, E. (2011), Le società multiculturali, second edition, Roma, Carocci. Gheno, V. and Mastroianni, B. (2020), Tienilo acceso. Posta, commenta, condividi senza spegnere il cervello, third edition, Milano, Longanesi. Mastroianni, B. (2017), La disputa felice. Dissentire senza litigare sui social network, sui media e in pubblico, Firenze, Cesati. Mastroianni, B. (2020), Litigando si impara. Disinnescare l’odio online con la disputa felice, Firenze, Cesati.