1,721,091 research outputs found
The AstraZeneca affair. How the junk news regime affected the public debate on the COVID-19 vaccination controversy in Italy
Full text linkIn recent years, there has been a notable increase in the presence of techno-scientific issues within public discourse, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. This proliferation has been attributed to the pervasive attention economy, which drives actors in hybrid media ecosystems to seek attention-grabbing topics. Socio-technical issues, known to evoke strong emotions like outrage and rivalry, have become recurring themes in both news and social media discussions. However, the regulatory mechanisms of the attention economy often impede the full exploration of these controversies in the public sphere, as news cycles and audience attention accelerate due to the prioritization of engaging content on social media platforms. This trend towards attention-driven content has compelled news organizations to adapt their business models, resulting in an environment where citizens may rely on confirmation bias, ultimately leading to polarization of public opinion. Consequently, effectively addressing controversies in today’s public debate has become increasingly challenging. To understand the extent of influence exerted by junk news – a transient form of content that distracts rather than nourishes public discourse – we conducted a case study focused on the controversy surrounding the adverse and lethal side effects of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine during the vaccination campaign in Italy. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive dataset of 798,954 tweets and 31,169 news articles spanning a six-month period, reveals three interconnected information disorders. Firstly, the vaccine debate displayed a relatively stagnant progression punctuated by sporadic spikes of attention. Secondly, the peaks of the debate involved sensationalized coverage in journalism and amplified discussions on Twitter, primarily centred around suspected vaccine-related deaths. Lastly, reports of these deaths by legacy media accounts on Twitter correlated with an increasing ideological and partisan reaction from social media users over time, contributing to polarization. These findings shed light on how the junk news regime can impede the shaping of public debates, particularly on contentious socio-technical issues such as vaccination campaigns. The implications of this research extend to the broader understanding of public engagement with science and the challenges posed by attention-driven media ecosystems
Televisore
No full textPrima riflessione critica sulle modalità di rappresentazione, e sugli impatti nelle strutture narrative, dell'oggetto televisivo all'interno della letteratura italiana contemporanea
Orologio
No full textIl saggio ripercorre il tema dell'orologio nella letteratura da Dante alla contemporaneità, con particolare attenzione alle metafore barocche e all'inquietudine novecentesca del tempo e della dissoluzione
Order flow fragmentation and flight-to-transparency during stressed market conditions: Evidence from COVID-19
No full textThe proliferation of trading venues has resulted in a fragmented secondary markets landscape both in the US and Europe. Different factors drive the fragmentation of order flow during normal market conditions. This paper studies the composition of order flow during stressed market conditions based on the COVID-19 outbreak. We specifically investigate two related questions. Firstly, we assess whether stressed market conditions alter the level of fragmentation and, secondly, we study the choice of lit vs. dark trading when markets are under stress. As for the first question, we construct a measure to capture order flow fragmentation and find that fragmentation strongly decreases when markets are under stress (i.e., traders concentrate their order flow in fewer venues in times of market stress). This is especially the case for stocks experiencing a deeper shock in volatility. As for the second question, we find a migration of order flow from dark to lit venues when markets are under stress. Our interpretation of this finding is that traders tend to move to lit venues, where the probability of trading with an informed trader is less severe, during times of hyper-volatility. We call this evidence 'flight-to-transparency'
Studying ageism on social media An exploration of ageing discourses related to Covid-19 in the Italian Twittersphere
No full textAs recent contributions by international scholars have highlighted, the state of emergency caused by the diffusion of Covid-19 has further stressed the importance of exploring ageism's pervasiveness and the extent to which ageist discourses are appropriated or opposed by the public. Since social media platforms seem to provide an increasingly relevant space for generational stereotyping that highlights conflict between younger and older generations, investigating ageism towards older people expressed on social media during the pandemic is deemed particularly important. This article explores ageing discourses circulated within the Italian Twittersphere during the first peak of the Covid-19 emergency. It draws on a dataset of 7M+ Covid-related tweets collected in the first phase of the health crises. Through quanti-qualitative analysis, it explores Twitter content related to Covid-19 and older people: 110,316 tweets detected taking advantage of a set of ad hoc keywords (e.g., anzian*, vecch*). Drawing on our findings, we show that explicit stereotypical opinions are quite residual, and we put forth and discuss the concept of platformised ageing discourse to explain how social media platforms' structure and functioning affect ageing-related cultural production
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Televisore
No full textCome tipico degli oggetti, alla valenza materiale corrisponde una sostanza immateriale profonda, che rinvia in questo caso ai programmi televisivi che emanano dall'apparecchio.
Essi, come l'oggetto televisore, rappresentano una realtà scomoda ed imbarazzante per quella che gli intellettuali letterati giudicano un'involuzione deleteria dell'assetto sociale nazionale, con palesi ricadute anche sul piano dell'assetto politico, e persino antropologico, dell'intera nazione.
Il saggio ripercorre le tappe principali di questa presenza affasciante e pericolosa del mezzo televisivo, così come la definiscono e ritraggono, i massimi autori letterri fra Novecento e nuovo millennio
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