RISULTATI RICERCA

L’eLearning is for Universities a chance and a challenge that must be faced. But several experimental tests lead in the last 8-10 years, and the well-known advanced maturity of the market ask for higher degree of quality that allows to leave the logic of experimentation to enter the logic of service. At the same time notebook, Internet, wi-fi, mobile phones and multimedia presentations enter the daily life of students and professors modifying the traditional learning environment and its actors. Little attention has been given to the research about this phenomenon. The No Paper Project idea was born from this consideration. This article shows the results of an empirical research lead by an ethnographical methodology about the use of personal computer and Web wireless technologies in university and domestic environment.

The objective of this analysis is to describe the new image of the adults in present day society and its influence on the young people. The present-day adults want to show themselves as non adults, like people living an eternal youth. They transform their faces, their bodies and their behaviour to be like those who are really young. The denial of one’s own age influences the choices of the young because adults communicate that Youth is the only age that is worth living. This message tells young people that growing up is useless and longing to plan for a future life is useless too.

The subject of this essay is the study on negotiation as a cultural practice and a model of social interaction, characterized by objectives and relationships that make it different from other types of communication. Contractual-type social relationships are typical in our society; therefore ours is an age of negotiation. People negotiate when something must be shared, or when a result must be achieved or a conflict that neither part could solve alone, must be solved. Therefore the negotiation practice is a daily action, and is different from other practices because it is founded on the perception of incompatibility and on the development of strategies and tactics focused on the achievement of a mutually acceptable agreement. Negotiation has an intrinsically polemic-conflictual nature: generally when people get in touch, a sort of fight occurs in order to assert their positions, ideas and beliefs, if not to even persuade the other to change opinion. Pragmatics and sociosemiotics try decomposing the negotiation process, and identifying the signs, the moves and the tactics of the strategical interaction.

The goal of the present research is to point out and to describe the features of the Italian web-sites dedicated to infancy and pre-adolescence in consideration of the capacity and risks that using such technology could mean for young people. The sample is constituted by 135 web sites. A content analysis grid composed by four thematic areas has been applied, as follows: A)general features of web sites; B)formal and structural features; C)communicative strategies; D)content features. The results point out the difference about formal and content aspects of the web sites. Referring to formal features it’s possible to find a different characterization of sites as different contents and elements connected to the different age classes of the target. Referring to content features the thematic areas dedicated to interactive games is the most representative besides knowledge and informative areas. Moreover, different sites emphasize, through their activities, different needs and values connected to self-actualization and knowledge or to fun and escape. In summary, it’s possible to underline that, regarding formal features there’s a different proposal connected to different age classes of the target, while there are not differences according to the gender of users.

In the modern information society, communication is more and more spread by new technologies and global webs that offer new forms of cultural participation, increasing possibilities of interaction among the subjects. Increasing rates of people are crowding the virtual arena of the cyberspace and, among these people, someone chooses spaces and paths typical of the leisure time, integrating or substituting by them the available range of opportunities: in Italy the loisir cybernauts are the 12,5% of the population aged from 14 years (ISTAT 2000). The main objective of this essay is to explore the relationship reinforcing or substitutive - between cyber-activities and other media and extramedia activities of the leisure time, in order to get a complex map of the loisir lived by users of the cyberspace and their social-demographic features. By avoiding any a priori classification and adopting an empirical-multidimensional approach, in this reference population the research has pointed out some segmentations that can be related to different existential instances and not univocal outlines of cultural behaviours and use of the leasure time. The strategy of empirical analysis has lead to the individuation of four different types of loisir cybernauts - the Indoors, the Outdoors, the Playful-interactives, the Instrumental-refined who are different in generational terms, for a different mix of their media and extramedia activities, and for a different competence in using Internet and the new media. While the rates of non-experts overtake those of experts among adults confirming the pyramid-shaped model that usually represents wider stages of population in correspondence of a more deprived cultural mix among young people this ratio is turned upside down: in young people the multimediality is actually characterizing a higher number of subjects who are able to integrate traditional and innovative media. Beyond the noticed differences, the recurrent element, rising from the analysis of the individuated types, is the complementarity of the loisir cyber-activities towards other activities and of their function that reinforces in some way the different life styles and the levels of cultural and recreational fruition.

The data show that TV has been slowly but progressively leaving its central place in the leisure time of Italian people in the years 1995-2000. The number of non-TV (a/ipoTV) members of the audience has been paralelly increasing. The proposed analysis, realised at the Osservatorio sul tempo libero - Dipartimento di Sociologia e Comunicazione - Università degli Studi La Sapienza, Rome has shown that the less cultured social areas are primarily moving away from TV, even if the reasons why the subjects are put in a more o less marginal place into the TV mainstreaming are more complex and often deeply heterogeneous. In this case a multivaried Istat Multiscopo data processing has been useful. In the first of the three specific TV clusters, moving away from TV seems to be only a residual condition towards a general lack of cultural opportunities and relational spurs in the leisure time. In the second group of subjects, the weak daily TV consumption is strictly complementary to a media mix of clear generalist mark, and to a position of the subjects in extremely active and full social webs. In the third cluster, finally, moving away from TV seems to be a natural way of finding a landingplace for very advanced multimedia paths, where low levels of TV consumption result crowned in a fully incremental way by the affiliation to the new technologies and interactivity languages.

The paper aims to show some of the findings of a sociological research based on a non-standard methodology on the processes of incorporation of new camera phones and MMS communication in the space, time and relation structures of Italian young users’ everyday experience. The research, begun in May 2003 and finished in October 2003, was financed by Motorola and carried out by Osservatorio sulla Comunicazione, the media research centre at the Università Cattolica in Milan. The field work (group and individual in-depth and non-directive interviews) has been conducted in Milan in two different phases and it has involved 70 boys and girls aged to 14 from 34, owners of the new devices (but we haven’t overlooked to listen also the resistants). In particular, the second phase of the research has been presented when the earlier forms of technological artefact and communication practices naturalisation have been emerged. The research shows the double nature of camera phone as technology of the self and as a sharing technology. Not only is it an increasingly personal technology, but a collective technology, a resource for the local interaction and face to face sociality as well. Exploring MMS communication practices, on one hand the paper shows how MMS messages - as a technology for access to, and sharing of, place and situation and for sharing objects and people - are deeply set in actual experience, underlining the importance of the physical and social context for their comprehension; moreover they are interpreted as a way of appropriating other people’s experience. On the other hand MMS communication results not only a playful and socializing technology, but also a technology enabling action, information, co-ordination, emergency management. As a new linguistic resource we can actually distinguish different visual forms: performative MMS messages, informative MMS messages; problem solving MMS messages.

In the author’s proposal, the reason why religion is coming more visible in the Italian neo-TV is an effect of the de-secularization process, that is an aspect of a wider social-cultural trend to the rediscovery of Catholicism in a society that nevertheless remains secularized. This rediscovery is occurring through new modalities, that are allowed by the great social spreading of TV; but these modalities seem to be a distortion as regards the religiosity model proposed by the religious institutions. This general thesis has been tested in front of the empirical reality by a comparative analysis on Auditel data related to the national TV networks in the period 1999-2001 about four types of religious programmes: the Sunday mass, the programmes for Catholic, Protestant and Jew audience, the fictions of religious matter and the outstanding ceremonies of the Jubilee 2000. The results of this analysis have confirmed the hypothesis of the research that had foreseen a Jubilee effect on the TV audience, that is an increasing number and a variation in the socio-demographic composition that has resulted nearer to the composition of population; this effect has been fading in the year 2001, at the end of the extraordinary event. Coming visible in TV involves for religion the transformation of the institutional form of religiosity. TV has at least three effects on religion: the con-fusion and reversibility between sacred and profane; a dys-intermediation of the local hierarchies, and the coming visible to a global level. These transformations are an interpretative challenge for both sociology and religious institutions; they are forced to ask themselves questions about the emergent religiosity model in the post-modern society.

The current culture puts the individual in a collective monologue produced by media. This monologue prepares and sets up the subjects transforming them in an audience. As a member of an audience, he/she is not participant in an experience or the actor of an event, but a user, a consumer of an artefact (object or image), whose creation he/she has not participated in. By its participation in the work the audience sets up an interaction that joins together reception and production, in a way that makes impossible to distinguish audience and artist. The emersion of a mass production with traditional and new media is causing a dissemination of aesthetical conventions, and the media aesthetics affects the way how the world is observed and the subject interacts: the socialization is the last stage of the acceptance of the new cultural forms produced by technology (Qvortrup 1998). Many types of culture operators are necessary in such a complex situation. They are requested to have a specialization, great flexibility and knowledge of the market, beside technical competence. The inability to know, except through symbols, comes from the uncertainty related to the deep nature of reality that involves every area of the knowledge, included the cultural one (Morin 1985). If subjectivity is the principle of the modern age, where modern people get their consciousness of freedom, the multiplicity of the points of view can also be asserted regarding to the multiplicity of cultures, reference systems and other; but this multiplicity is at the same time part of the same culture and the same reference system.

At the present time art is more and more considered a social fact rather than a cultural one, to the point that it doesn’t seem to appeal to the public opinion and, in particularly, to the new generations, if not in the sense of a more or less banalizing social aggregation. The relationship that audience seems currently to prefer that makes art an object to use - has some analogy with the relationship that we generally set up with another area of the cultural phenomenology, that is the relationship we set up with the new technologies. By analysing how we use the available technologies, we can guess an anthropological trend, according to which knowledge is important for human beings, but only on condition that they can pursue it avoiding the models of the critical thought. Also in the art information seems to replace knowledge, use seems to replace fruition, stressing in the general perception the consumer and utilitarian aspect instead of the aesthetical satisfaction.

In the expression Web culture there is an ethic and a cognitive meaning. In spite of their respective autonomy e complexity, these two dimensions are inseparably linked and give rise to a virtuous circle that gives account of the richness, the complexity and, above all, the problematic nature of the Web culture. The first meaning is related to the impact of the Web and its cultural products on the leading model in the western and non-western societies. In this case the spreading of the Web - and technologies involved by it - must be intended as a cultural feature that is englobed by societies, which consequently expresses and characterises them. But, in spite of the large spreading of the Web, this assimilation is not homogenous at all; considerable versions and disparities are reproducing in the digital world the same differences, inclusions and exclusions that already are in the society. In this way the problematic aspects in the access to the Web that come together in the digital divide are rising, and bring out the importance of the information society development as an opportunity to a global development. According to the second meaning, the Web culture is part of the cognitive dimension, that is of the cognitive competences that it stimulates and asks for. In this case the culture production of the Web becomes plural: culture of the image, scientific knowledge, daily knowledge. Do general features and not negligible epistemological aspects persist beyond the differences? In other words, are the cognitive dynamics of the knowledge in the Web related to the question How do we know? adequately brought out? The relationship between the two different meanings is then recurrent, a virtuous circle where ethic and cognitive aspects product together the Web culture.

Instead of being only a symptomatic witness of the development of the new reticular and polycentric culture, the school of today, as the main referent of education, can certainly play the role of its interpreter; by supplying the student, who is the fulcrum and the manager of the cognitive process, with correct epistemological instruments, it can match the scholastic world of education, the one of linear, analytic, forced-march learning, with the experimental world, which means synthetic, reticular and interconnected learning, led by the vocational medium of the new technologies. By the analysis of the stages of an announced change, we can outline the new paradigms through which declining the new scene of learning mediated by the technology, with particular attention to the new shapes of knowledge. Above all, we must consider the real usage of some instruments, such as the hypertext, in the light of the Media Education, seen as an opportunity of integration between paradigms, interpretative models and models incorporated into action, well ready for certification and evaluation. The introduction of the new technologies in the educative perspective, as it will emerge from the present study, can determine meaningful redefinitions of interactions between the actors of the educative process and its context of reference, between traditional knowledge and new knowledge, between the instruments that we employ and the effects that we can produce. Such a change determines, in many cases, the possibility of redesign the route of knowledge activated by the medial fruition, establishing warm points of contact between negotiation of knowledge and its synthesis in the weave of experience. Finally, it’s important to note another possible viewpoint by which understand the relationship between media and education: the actual involvement of the deeper dimensions of the learner everyday life, the production of meaningful pushes to change and the adhesion to the meaning of reality. This process can and must be activated by the employment of the media and the new media inside and outside the school, as long as they constitute the common object on which working, and as long as they are the cultural coupler between being in this world and planning out a different world.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the relationship between magazine advertising and gender social definition. The theoretical approach underlines how the language of advertising produces representations independent from the advertised goods, so to provide a communicative surplus. Besides its technical-practical literal meaning (selling goods), by using suggestive shapes and a metaphorical language the advertising produces a wider social and symbolical meaning, and at the same time a system of secondary values. Nowadays, such values have a great relevance in the advertising campaigns: they are also able to define and reproduce typical behaviour. These representations embrace actually behaviour modalities that, on one hand, express pre-existing social and existential realities; on the other hand they aim to build new ones. In both cases they influence the every-day life. Given these introductory statements our empirical work aim to characterize some gender representation and differences between males and females in behavioural features. To deal with this, we have focused on two kinds of gender magazine, selected on the basis of their target and their spreading on the national (Italy) scale. Trough an analytical criterion of relevance we selected a corpus of sampled imagines. Starting from the analysis of communicative frames and their specific patterns of correlation of the different element contained in the advertising message, it was possible to individuate some gender prototype.

By taking Jean Epstein’s theoretical remarks on the cinema and Norbert Elias’s on the symbolic emancipation concept as a starting point, the author proposes an analysis of the changes linked to the relationship between media and new forms of symbolic emancipation, focusing on the role which videogames have played in the last twenty years’ period in forming the so told simulation culture in the western countries. The essay ends with some considerations about transformations in the experiential modalities that are involving the new generations and about the widespread debate on the passage from homo legens to homo communicans (also called homo game).

The essay shows the techno-cultural transformations that have characterized the late beginning of the long seriality in the Italian TV fiction, starting from the crucial event of the broadcasting of the first Italian soap opera, Un posto al sole. The coming of industrial standards of writing in Italy marks a new stage of mass communications. In this new phase on one hand the writers must reconvert their competences to the need of the production cycle, on the other hand they are tending to retreat into their traditional prerogatives. Within a quickly changing horizons of media, the challenge of seriality is one of the critical matters in the sociological debate on the nature of mass culture, a debate which links the various themes of the contemporary communication (from the transformation in the intellectual roles to the matter of TV quality in the intricate and crucial plot of the identity process.

The media objects are good points of view to observe the logics of social life, the self-descriptions of society and its symbolic reproduction, the basic features of its imagery. The media objects give us the image of a society not longer symbolically founded on a stratified order of the differences but made by a web of included individuals: they are also the place where the images and the logics of a social and abstract symbolic world become visible and real, where they are incorporated in forms and practices, and so give a form to thoughts and relationships. Among these objects, the mobile telephone is un example of mediator object because of the incorporation of the logic of contingence whose roots can be found in the indifference of symbolic forms and ideas which modernity is based on, money in particularly.

The close relationship between the reality of media and cultural forms can be read according to a double way of research. 1. A tradition of studies that has recently found a unit name in the concept of media studies. Media studies mean to think about media as place of the contemporary experience, as land of production and negotiation of expressive languages and symbolic forms, as ambit for building paths of meaning, both individual and collective, as places for the cognitive and corporeal living; real worlds, which in other occasion I have called media-mondo. 2. A second possibility of research is to observe the problem from a privileged place: communication, ambit able to show the developmental synchrony between media and society. In this way the media cultures are emergent forms of the coupling media/society, places where the fact that the individual takes upon itself the features of the contemporary social world gets visible, takes over the developmental strategies of the social world, its languages: a. the contingency a condition that is neither of impossibility nor of necessity, where all games are open and, at the same time, unpredictable ; b. the virtuality a condition of life where we can actually think about ourselves in an abstract way thanks to the potentialities of the technique and the familiarization with the technological imagery made and supported by media, a condition by which every single aspect of the life is perceived and acted as possible otherwise. In the intersection between approach founded on media studies and communication, we can observe the media cultures as universes stretched between forms of expressiveness, oriented to creativity and manifestation of individual freedom, and the industrial forms of the imagery where experiences, by orienting themselves to the contingency, get away from the bodies.

By this essay the author wants to share in the debate on the present state of the studies about communication. They need a compelling turning point, regarding the review of the analysis instrument and the theoretical categories related to what communication is in post-modernity. By this way, a very critical judgement is actually expressed towards communicationists, whose great limit is not to really focus on how the media communication is changing, to borrow from other branches of learning concepts and useful remarks grounded to the categories of the modern time. The studies on communication are above all accused not to take into account the changes in the modern subjectivity, a matter that other branches of learning has made responsible for; in the same way the anthropological-cultural transformation that has occurred in the consumption set in the mass society imagery that is promoted by the generalist media, has not been taken into the right consideration. Basically the language of communication itself must be reviewed, in order to make up for that lack of communication culture expressed by those who think to talk about it as experts, but are at last only bearers and further spreaders of common places.

The essay has the aim to demonstrate how making culture means to make communication, and to make its strategic management a meeting area among several instances which reveal themselves under the form of cultures and culture in its original and primary meaning. On this basis, promoting the idea of a virtuous circle between culture - in its widest and deepest meaning - and the different cultural manifestations from the bottom, linked to the specific areas also media areas and to different ways of living in them and/or to tell them, could become, in the authoress’s purpose, the first step to set up a sort of manifesto of the modern culture and its richness.