1,721,145 research outputs found
ICTs and The Human Body. A Social Representation Approach
No full textAim of the research was to monitor how new technologies - mainly the mobile and the internet - and the human body (as well as the Self) are considered, within a social representations approach. Nearly three hundred university students from different disciplinary fields answered a questionnaire aimed to detect the content (through free associations), the attitudes (through a semantic differential scale) and the structure (through correspondence analysis based on the free associations) of the representations. Results show that everyday thinking seems not to have integrated, at a conceptual level, the ongoing process of convergence between the human body and technologies. Along the detected dimensions, different groups take different positions, mainly as regards allocations, practices, and concerns with the human body
Research project reformulation
No full textThe implementation of a research in ordinary contexts deals usually with a rate of inscrutability, because the activity of planning time, costs and human resources, even if well designed, has to deal with variables not always identifiable or well defined. This study describes how a research, that had been designed to explore, in a village in Tuscany, citizens’ ideas, reactions and evauations about the projects of urban intervention proposed by the municipality, has been transformed in a research regarding the initiatives undertaken by the municipality during the emergency, the media used by both citizens and municipality and the evaluation of the efficiency of public communication
Sociality on the Move
No full textThe aim of this chapter is to advance the theoretical reflection on mobile sociality by examining closely the main concepts arising from social theory that concur to define it. I start from the notion of spatial mobility, which represents a relevant element of society’s structures and in turn has the capacity to produce relevant social change, seen both as work mobility and mobility in the reproductive sphere. I analyse this notion, through and beyond Marxian categories, with the view of capturing their social meaning in terms of a critique informed by political economy. Then I turn to examining the classic sociological concept of social mobility, its recent vicissitudes, and why mobility has increased so much with modernity. After this, I address the concept of sociability and what makes it distinct from sociality. My analysis of sociality on the move addresses its structure that brings together 3 elements: communication, labour and mobility. Again here, I explore its social meaning as well as its main forms and the social dimensions embodied in them. Finally, I examine the concept of mobile sociality that includes these different notions, by reshaping and integrating them. My attempt is to reconstruct the shift from a debate considering mobility and sociality as two separate
How Prepaid Billing in Italy Helped Shape the Global Diffusion of Mobile Phones
No full textWhy was Italy the first country to introduce prepaid mobile phone billing services in 1996? What was the key to its success that led seventy-five telecommunications operators to introduce prepaid billing by 1998 and accel-erated the mass adoption of mobile phones around the world? This article examines why prepaid was successful in light of national policies and sociocul-tural shifts. Along with SMS, handhelds, GSM, and the digitization of mobile communications, prepaid billing played a role in the rapid and immense spread of the mobile phone worldwide. As an innovative means of paying for mobile phone usage, prepaid represented a departure from operators’ previous mobile phone payment methods. The article argues that by overlooking the contribution of this form of payment, telephone historians, the media, and business scholars have ignored this important driver of the success of mobile phones
Unsung convergence of analogue to analogue: Add-ons, supplements and the evolving roles of the print newspaper
No full textUnderstanding Mobile News: Looking beyond the Lockscreen
No full textThis brief commentary takes stock of topics raised in this special issue, before arguing that the parameters of research into mobile news, while still being defined by articles like those published here, should broaden to constitute a developed sub-field of journalism studies. Fruitful avenues of endeavour include motivations for use of mobile, including not only convenience but a heightened need to know, as well as aspects of time, space, news consumption ritual, effects and political economy
Journalism’s sharp end: Fatal materiality and the algorithms of profit and political extremism
No full textThis conceptual paper focusses on two fronts forming a broad assault on journalism, extending from more autocratic settings to include liberal democracies, and leading to what is now widely perceived as a crisis in news. We analyze these two attacks by presenting a framework integrating their sources and causes. We argue that the first attack emanates from commercialized media, occurring at economic and normative level, and has created, at least in part, the conditions that have enabled the more recent attack, which is more directly political, associated with the re-emergence of forces that are loosely categorized as populist. What is new in the second front is the geography and the constitutional nature of the societies in which this antagonism has grown. It extends now to long-established representative democracies that have come to be governed, or where new influence is wielded, by emergent right movements and parties who seek to cast the press as the enemy within. Abuse and even mortal danger increasingly have become part of the occupational reality of news-making. We conclude that this development is inscribed in the current material conditions under which journalists work, as well as in the materiality of the media through which they do so
- …
