The web is often seen as a spider's web.

In the minds of cyber-utopians, this web is perfect, perfectly connected in an architecture of points and lines without smudges. A safety net in which freedom, democracy and peace thrive, and the internet as a weapon to bring down any dictatorship or despotism and bring freedom.

This spider is actually far from perfect.

Its lines are all of different lengths, they jump around and many connections are imprecise.

The idea that “the web spreads knowledge” – which in itself is also true – clashes with our inadequacy in defining new ways of structuring knowledge, learning and searching for information.

Whether you see the Internet as a hope or a threat, everyone can agree on the principle that truth and knowledge are essential for open and reasonable civil encounters with those who disagree with our opinion.

The web is full of network nodes.

A drop of water resting on it can be seen as a distorting lens that threatens to make us see that huge and decisive node in the entire network, even when it is absolutely peripheral and marginal. Being in that node, with that drop above us, transforms our perspective on the entire network and, worse still, makes us believe that “we” are “the” relevant and essential node.

David Weinberger in “The Intelligent Room” warns against “echo rooms”, where only (or mainly) like-minded users are present: “We must beware of the psychological traps of echo rooms, which lead us to believe that our beliefs are 'obviously” true, allowing us to slide towards extremes'.

Starting from this concept, we will talk about the “stupid room” and I will try to outline how being closed in an echo room produces increasingly engaging effects.

What remains in the “stupid room” is only a dual individual instinct within the echo group: to maximise one's position and emerge as a subject in agreement with the prevailing opinion, within a behaviourally conditioning community, in a context that is essentially closed among people who will continue to work together on other events in the future.

The stupid room makes us feel safe, in a protected environment among people who think like us, on condition that we give up something in terms of “intelligence” and doubt, endorsing our position and opinion to the dominant one, in the certainty that “the group” will move in the same way. It is an instinctive process, not rational, conscious or predetermined.

However, it deprives us of analysis of the issue, of different points of view on the problem and its solution, and essentially ceases to be “a group that discusses” to become “a place not for sharing and passive, uncritical dissemination of the message”.

By analysing a particular case, the behavioural and communicative dynamics of a small group and the dynamics of a story, we will be faced with the choice of the means and paths that communication should follow and the effects of the indiscriminate use of “any means”, and what happens if a room becomes a stupid “political advisor” and if “politics” follows the advice of the stupid room.