BOOKS BY ROBERTA BARTOLETTI

Eastern Germany The article analyses consumerism as a place of production in the meaning, with regards to the relevant data and biographies that may be dissociated with public addresses with regards to identity and the underlying data. There is an evident link between the product and memory, which is valuable to find one’s own identity. A case study about the recent history of East Germany from the market of Ostalgia, began and was developed after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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.

In the western thought the fetish is traditionally related to an inadequate substitution in meaning and relationship construction. This interpretation is in Marx’ fetishism of the goods, in the Freud’ sexual fetishism, or in the latest conceptualisations. The Michel Serres’ thought allows us to replace the fetish, in its quality of quasi-object, in the centre of the collective production. And by the comparison with a particular kind of quasi-object, the joker, perfectly represented by money, incarnation of the abstract, it’s possible to think of the ambivalence that seems to characterize the contemporary objects, shared out between a typically social abstract symbolic and a symbolic deep-rooted in the bodies, in the Langue, in personal stories and knowledge.

This article displays the main results of a research about a specific typology of social nets - the civic nets - as a possible factor of socio-cultural and institutional innovation, in particular into the macro-macro, macro-micro and micro-micro communicative dynamics that involve institutions, citizens and associations. More precisely, the research started from the hypothesis that a new telecom-net - that overlaps and interacts with the traditional social nets - could co-determine a change in communication in the local community. The study of a civic net case has been carried out starting from an analysis of the literature and the experience of civic nets in Italy and abroad. This analysis wanted to identify key-categories and variables useful to understand a very complex phenomenon which is strongly expanding in our country. The chosen civic net was the relatively atypical Urbino’s one, which has revealed itself particularly significant for the study of macro-macro communicative dynamics, one of the focuses of the research. Moreover, the Urbino case can be an empiric evidence in support of the hypothesis that the declared aims of civic and telecom-nets can be reached only by increasing technologic networks and social networks together, that is adding value the intermediate aggregative structures: the telecom-net principally can develop where it is supported by social nets. In our case the social net are prevalently informal, given the relative weakness of the institutional net (into the promoter body and among different bodies). With reference to the macro-micro relationships, and then the participation of the citizens in the civic net, the broad-spectrum analysis of the different possibilities of inter-action between civic government and citizens in the Urbino’s net shows the weakness of the communicative channels in this stage.