COMUNICAZIONI SOCIALI - 2003 - 3. Comunicazione e vita quotidiana

La televisione ha reso disponibile una straordinaria quantità di informazione: tutti noi siamo, in un certo senso, «spettatori globali», testimoni oculari di quanto accade ovunque nel mondo. Essere spettatori significa essere esposti a un’enorme sfida etica. Rimanere passivi spettatori può renderci, almeno dal punto di vista morale, complici delle ingiustizie cui assistiamo, pur con i nostri sforzi di rimozione del senso di colpa («non c’è niente che io possa fare»). Tuttavia i media aprono la strada per la trasformazione degli spettatori in attori. Vedere e comprendere è certamente la condizione preliminare dell’azione morale, una condizione necessaria ma non sufficiente. I media possono aiutare a comprendere, ma occorre colmare il salto tra la comprensione e l’azione. Nell’era dell’insicurezza e della vulnerabilità globali, forse per la prima volta nella storia, istinto di sopravvivenza e imperativo etico sembrano puntare nella stessa direzione.

Questo articolo esplora le diverse opportunità rese disponibili dalle nuove tecnologie della comunicazione, in particolare la televisione satellitare e Internet, relativamente alle possibilità di acquisizione di consapevolezza e di orientamento all’azione. In particolare alcune fasce del pubblico, soprattutto le donne e i giovani, tradizionalmente dotate di scarso potere di accesso ai dibattiti e alle questioni di interesse pubblico, acquisiscono finalmente la possibilità di costruirsi una propria opinione sulla base delle risorse simboliche ampiamente disponibili. La rete poi, grazie all’interattività e alla facilità di accesso, rappresenta un’opportunità per la costruzione di forme della società civile dal basso. Al-Jazeera, la rete satellitare che trasmette dal 1996, ha fornito un contributo cruciale per la definizione e divulgazione di un «Islam digitale», oltre ad avere offerto importanti esempi di stili di conduzione dei programmi che si rivolgono allo spettatore come a un pari, fornendo informazioni che restituiscono la pluralità dei punti di vista sulle questioni e sollecitando l’argomentazione e la riflessione, più che il coinvolgimento emotivo. Internet consente a persone che per collocazione geografica o posizione sociale si trovano in una situazione di marginalità la possibilità di auto-rappresentarsi, non solo entro la cerchia ristretta del proprio gruppo, ma nell’arena globale.

The topic of the essay concerns communicative routines and strategies of domestication and appropriation of the Intranet technology. Moving from a constructionist approach and from the literature on the «communities of practice», the concept of everyday life seems to play a crucial role both in the working and communicative practices and in the strategies and learning contexts that social actors set up in the social construction of the Intranet technology. The interaction of old and new technologies (with their routines) is strictly linked to the processes of negotiation of meaning and content related to sociotechnical innovation. The fieldwork, based on an ethnographic observation of a middle size Italian firm, shows that a new technology can represent both a way of access into the life and communicative processes of an organization, and a way to reinforce and/or construct the organizational identity.

The article puts forward some reflections on the relational dynamics that develop among the actors involved in research activity. The reference is to an investigative analysis of the representations and experiences of ‘vulnerability’ that centred on women whose position was that of wives and mothers in one income families, living in Turin. The study was conducted by using focus group, applied with a specific implementation, namely by setting up a number of discussion meetings with the same group of women, spread over a period of time. Attention centred partly on the dynamics of interaction that came into play between the participating women and the researcher, highlighting the way it affected the nature of the findings but also that it was crucial in illuminating the phenomenon under study. Thus the article explores the role of interactive and communicative processes in research situations that imply face-to-face relationships within small groups.

This essay does not claim to make a statement concerning the definition of truth: rather, it seeks to provide insight into the consequences that may follow from specific assumptions on what is considered to be either true or false – or asserted to be such – by the actors involved in the processes of public decision-making. Attention thus focuses here mainly on the effects of practices involved in the social construction of reality and the role of communication processes within the framework of such practices. Utilising the Colemann Macro-Micro-Macro model, the article aims to identify some of the possible social mechanisms that come into play at different levels and favour specific configurations of truth and falsehood in the context of public utterances circulated via the institutions and the media. In conclusion, two figures are analysed (Spin doctors and parresiastes) that ideally represent the opposite poles of a continuum which links the many possible declinations of truth and falsehood.

The relation between media and consumption experience constitutes one of the crucial topic within the latest sociological and Media Studies approaches. By highlighting the close connection between, on the one hand, the subject’s knowledge of the world and, on the other, the subject’s contact with the media, studies in this field have identified the media experience as playing a fundamental role in the construction of social forms in contemporary world. Within the more specific framework of Television studies, the development of new multiplatform reality formats (i.e. formats created and designed for distribution over various different means of communication, such as television, pay-Tv, the web) has become the object of a series of research focusing on various different aspects and drawing on a range of analyses. The main findings reveal that a number of changes are currently influencing the relation between media, public and society, leading towards new forms of activity and interaction. The aim of the present paper is thus to shed light on some elements of ongoing dynamism in the relation between the medium of television and the viewers, with particular emphasis on Reality Tv as a subject of investigation. The rationale for choosing this particular subject lies in its nature as a communicative context that most clearly exemplifies the on-going redefinition of the status of public television, in the sense that broadcasting is undergoing a transformation into a set of subjects who are increasingly ‘active’ and ‘performers’ on the television scene. The connection between consumption of a reality programme and the construction of identity within everyday life thus underlines the rise of a ‘viewership’ capable of managing the environment of the performance, precisely by virtue of the reconfiguration of the relationship with the media.

Borrowing from philosophy (Wittgenstein) and linguistics (Benveniste), the article suggests that the ‘incorporeal’ communication proper to chat (artificial – rather than virtual – chatting) should be considered as a form of ‘one-way’ communication, and that it owes this characteristic to more than one aspect. First and foremost, only the sense of sight is activated: one ‘listens’ with the eyes, and no other sense intervenes to define the relationship with the other person and the meaning of his or her words. Secondly, the evocative power of language, in the chat room, is inherent to the ‘keyed-in’ language (not spoken and not even written): in the absence of the real body of the other, what is evoked here is, primarily, a wide variety of ‘proper bodies’, imaginary or based on ideas, drawn from the repertory of speaking bodies that make up the experience of each individual chatter. In the third place, the object of comprehension, for each chatter, is what appears on the chatter’s computer screen (the words typed in by the other chatters), and reading, in contrast to listening, awards priority to the ‘relation with that which is identical’, to use Barthes’ words. It is only by grasping – among other things – the implicit rules of the game (which are not written and do not correspond to those of so-called ‘netiquette’) that a chatter can actually conceptualise the chatroom conversation as an ‘organised game’ and play it with great enjoyment, bypassing the ‘dangers’ and ‘disappointments’ of any ‘primitive’ or purely imaginary representation of play.