2002 - Sociologia dei nuovi media

Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 2018

New technologies of comm unication affect the social and cultural constellations in society. This essay adopts a perspective linking the three key concepts of networks, culture, and communication to examine these constellations and the effects of new media on them. Culture and networks are seen as interwoven, with cultural forms disseminating in networks, but also shaping them. New media alter the conditions of communication taking place in networks—with communication taking place across space and time, dyadically, within groups, or one-to-many, depending on the media at hand. The mass media of printed materials, radio, television, and the Internet, then, disseminate cultural forms in addition to the direct communication in interpersonal networks. Due to their social and economic conditions of production, writing and print media foster the development of first elite cultures, then high languages and national cultures, and finally life-style subcultures. The broadcast media of radio and television make for a blurring of social boundaries and for the homogenization of knowledge in complex modern societies, at least before their increasing specialization in the late 20th century. The Internet, in contrast, caters international subcultures and fosters cultural fragmentation.

Argumentum: Journal of the Seminar of Discursive …, 2011

Studies of Changing Societies, 2014

The perspectives of digital sociology formation through the prism of transformation of new media are considered in the article. We confirm the beginning of the age of intelligent media, which incorporate the network principle of organization of the interactions with the implementations of artifacts (artificial intelligent agents) to communication processes and are the base for the formation of digital environment for human life. Among the main socio-cultural effects of the development of new media we rank the expansion of social reality due to the addition of a “digital dimension” to it, the formation of network culture and actualization of the communicative (and subsequently, network and digital) subjectivity. We consider the network culture from the point of view of the activity approach and define it as a conglomerate of stationary value and normative mechanisms, technological means of implementation and results of network communications. We consider the network culture formation...

World history has been characterized by periods such as Feudalism, Industrialism and Capitalism that have served social scientists as tools to analyse and identify particular societies. Similarly, the characteristic and defining feature of the contemporary society is Information and Communicating Technology (ICT). Resultant to the ICT explosion and application there has been radical transformation in education, corporate sector, Government sector and most significantly, democracy is being reassessed. This paper attempts to gaze into the social impacts of new media technologies assuming that in this ICT dominant world human and social contexts of technology are undermined with an assumption that ICT and its applications have the same meaning and consequences for all. But recognizing the fact that social context plays a significant role in influencing ICT and its applications in diverse ways, an attempt is also made to highlight the reciprocal relationship between social context and information technology.

Presenting the readers with publication on the functioning of new media in contemporary social spaces it is worth to look back and refer to the famous these by Marshal McLuhan who contributed enormously to the development the modern discourse about media and communication. He gain his renown with foreseeing humankind entering the “information age” and the beginning of the “global village” era. Global as it would include almost all contemporary world. Village as humans dispose the communication means with unprecedented speed, capacity and availability. McLuhan was also the first one who pointed out that the modern media (means of communication) become a carrying and engaging message themselves, they affect greatly the character of information and styles of perception. Moreover, he notices, the character of the communication means has greater impact in the receiver than the message itself (Understanding media the extensions of man, New York : McGraw-Hill, 1964). The reference to on of the greatest mass communication theoreticians is important as, while it was formed on the basis of observation, mainly satellite television, McLuhan’s vision practically fulfills today due to the digital revolution in the 90’s and popularization of the Internet and new media. It is today that first “digital natives” enter into adulthood (Mac Prensky), that is the children of the new media era, a generation socialized not only by the social environment: peer groups, older adults, but also – to a large degree – by the digital media.

2006

Comunicazioni Sociali, 2017

This paper aims to analyze the italian culture of connectivity, produced by the interrelation of social media and social ties evolution, by highlighting the dynamics of power and participation and overcoming the dichotomy between the “manipulative” and “democratization” media theses. The essay therefore focuses on the specific transition between web 1.0 and web 2.0 tracing a change, worked by the spread of social networking platforms, in the discourses on the social sense of connectivity: in other words, reconstructing an history of technological and communicative transformations coupled with specific events capable of producing a different social consciousness of connectivity. The approach adopted to analyze this transition in terms of the social history of the media will be periodization, while the mediatization approach will serve as the broader framework for understanding and interpreting the relation between the spread of the social media and the evolution of a sense of social ties as an expression of culture of connectivity. In specific terms, linking the periodization perspective to the mediatization angle will involve taking the temporal dimension into account on at least three levels: an events-based, micro-type temporality, capable of identifying specific media events or widespread media practices; a meso-type temporality, marked by a succession of media waves which underline the disruptive effect of certain ecosystemic configurations of media devices, capable of significantly altering both market and cultural dimensions; a macro-temporal dimension, suitable for tracing a succession of technological ages, such as the passage described in the literature as the transition from the age of the industrial revolution to the information or digital age. This framework provided by the mediatization used through a periodization approach to digital evolution in Italy has enabled us to detect – in the context of a long-term perspective on the digital age – the countercyclical role of digital in Italy which, especially in the mid-period, both fostered and characterized the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. More specifically, by adopting a short-term, evenemential logic to analyze the time span from 2009 to 2014, it has proved possible to trace the way in which the mediatization of the social tie, achieved by the diffusion of web 2.0 in Italy, resulted in a swift transition from a rhetoric of “friendship” to a rhetoric of “participation” which was widely perceived as becoming, in a political sense, increasingly critical.

International Journal of Communication, 2008

Review of "Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice" by Nick Couldry, to be published in European Journal of Communication.