Dario Pozzilli
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the
newspaper, you’re misinformed”.
This is a quote by Mark Twain, also known as Samuel Langhorne
Clemens, who was one of the most important American writers of the 19th
century. He was the author of famous masterpieces such as The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
which have had numerous television and film adaptations. He was
considered by William Faulkner to be the first true American writer.
Twain found himself working at a young age due to the death of his father.
At first he dedicated to journalism, then to writing humorous stories;
finally, following tragic events such as the death of his brother, his wife
and his two daughters, he took on a severe, sarcastic and pessimistic style,
endowed with a profound ironic and misanthropic cynicism. Huckleberry
Finn is considered the emblem of Twain's literature, which manifests
through fine humor, a solid social criticism at a level unrivaled in the vast
milieu of the American literature.
I chose this quote because it really surprised me and made me think about
the modern society. Every day we’re surrounded by hundreds of thousands
of news and informations from every corner of the earth through our
phones. With the birth of social networks, anyone have had the
opportunity to spread news and informations on a large scale, however
even if this may apparently seem like something positive, it actually can be
extremely dangerous. Giving everybody the possibility to express their
opinions and their thoughts on social and political topics, is certainly
something right but the problem comes when the informations and the
ideas spread out are wrong or bad and their influence affects negatively
who receives them. The worst part is that we cannot see the problem of the
misinformation only on social networks but it also affects the big
companies of newspapers and TV news. Nowadays everything is based on
business, and most of times newspapers companies want to spread
frivolous news only to attract as many audiences as possible, ignoring the
