I must have made some mistakes on social media in the past because the Instagram algorithm, which suggests content to me every day based on my alleged interests, continues to offer me authentic junk. But even that of TikTok, which instead doesn’t care about my interests and offers me the videos it thinks I’ll like, stuffs me with shoddy stuff: it treats me as if I were a “Drive In” viewer looking for jokes.
Some days on social media you wonder if there is still quality stuff on the net that is worth reading or watching or listening to. In this context, a new cultural magazine makes its debut – on YouTube, Spotify, Instagram: it is called Lucysullacultura, Lucy, like the Australopithecus discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia and considered the ancestor of humanity. The writer Nicola Lagioia directs it with contagious enthusiasm and presents an unpublished story by the French writer Annie Ernaux who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lucysullacultura is obviously not the only example of a quality container on the net: it is only the last, indeed, the penultimate, in fact Michele Serra’s newsletter makes its debut on the Post on Monday. They may seem like suicidal operations in a digital world that requires us to distort communication – what we say, how we say it – in search of clicks and followers. But clicks and followers aren’t the measure of all things: they don’t build communities, they don’t convey values, they don’t inspire change. Or at least, not necessarily.
Putting valuable content online, not just thinking about “making traffic”, is not just a form of resistance to algorithms, it is not a mere testimony of the past, it is an act of trust in the future, in others, in readers, and above all in young people who are much better – curious, passionate, profound – than the social media machines would like them to be.