1,721,024 research outputs found
From Scientific to Syncretic Patchwork Storytelling: The Discursive Ecosystem of Italian Stop 5G Refused Knowledge Communities
No full textThe chapter delves into the Italian Stop5G movement, aiming to explore the discursive practices - media related and not - it employs to construct, stabilize and in some occasions radically transform a body of shared knowledge refused by the majority of the scientific community - in particular, regarding the effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiations. For this end it adopts a perspective inspired by the Social Worlds Framework (Clarke & Star 2007) - that conceives social worlds and their discourses as co-constructed - and by an ecological understanding of media (Anderson 2016) - that conceives them as a vast interconnected environment where discourses interact in different ways: sometimes competing, sometimes adapting one to the other, and sometimes again merging in new ones.
Through on one year of online and offline ethnographic observation (between 2019 and 2020), interviewees to citizens and activists, and focus groups with different samples of population, it was possible to identify four phases characterizing the social world of the Stop5G movement, its discursive practices, and its shared knowledge:
1. The phase of public appeals (2017-2018), featuring scientists contesting officially accepted knowledge on electromagnetic fields;
2. The activist phase (2018-2020), with an increasing number of citizens organized in local groups participating in the social world and the arena, and adopting discursive strategy closely mirroring the ones from the previous phase;
3. An intermediate phase at the beginning of the pandemic crisis (February-April 2020), where discursive practices in the social world begun to undergo significant transformations, particularly in addressing the nature of the virus and the associated illness;
4. The pandemic phase (until the end of 2020, when observation came to and end), when discourses in the social world, with some significant exceptions, took a populist or conspiratorial turn.
Forfor the Stop 5G movement these phases marked a turn from a 'scientific' to a 'syncretic' patchwork storytelling approach in the discursive practices of knowledge production and of contestation of official science. In sum, the former relied on the selection of sources strictly deemed as scientific (i.e. peer reviewd papers published in scientific journals) all confirming the harmful nature of 5G waves; the latter assembled materials from a vast array of different sources, including science, new age spiritualism, cultural critic and conspiracism. At the same time, throught these phases the 5G movement radically trandformed its organizational forms, but also the ensable of mediated and not mediated spaces employed for its communicative practices.
The chapter contributes to the understanding of the tight intertwinement between the structuration of a social world and of its arena, its discursive practices – media related and not - and the shared knowledge produced by these same practices
Practicing Urban Media Studies: An Interview With Will Straw
Full text linkIn this interview, Simone Tosoni and Seija Ridell discuss with Will Straw, professor of urban media studies at McGill University, Canada, his views of this subject area. Professorships that would explicitly focus on the intersection of media studies and urban studies are rare internationally, Straw’s position being one of them. The interview sheds light on how urban media studies came about and were institutionalized at McGill University, how Straw practices urban media studies in his own teaching, and how he sees the future of this “interdiscipline.” The second part of the interview addresses two of Straw’s main research topics and their relation to urban media studies: his studies on scenes and the night
Italian Goth Subculture. Kindred Creatures and Other Dark Enactments in Milan, 1982-1991.
No full textThis book is the first in-depth investigation of the Goth subculture in Italy, focusing in particular on the city of Milan. It grows out of a three year research project - the first in Italy of this scope on the topic - based on the life histories of two dozen participants. In light of this, Simone Tosoni and Emanuela Zuccalà propose an innovative approach to the study of spectacular subcultures: contrarily to the most common accounts of the spectacular subcultures of the 80s, this book describes the experience of subcultural belonging as plural and internally diversified. In particular, three different variations - or 'enactments' - of goth are described in-depth: the politically engaged one; the one typical of the scene of the alternative music clubs spread all over northern Italy; and the one, common in the little towns surrounding Milan (but not limited to it), where participants used to 'enact' the dark subculture alone or in small groups. Their book argues that while these three different variations of goth shared the same canon of subcultural resources (music, style, patterns of cultural consumptions), they differed under relevant points of view, like forms of socialization, stance toward political activism, identity construction processes, and even their relationship with urban space. Yet, contrarily to the stress on individual differences in 'subcultural' belonging typical of post-subcultural theorists, the Milanese variations of goth appear to have been socially shared, as socially shared were the different 'practices of enactment' of the subculture that characterized each of them
Vidding and its Media Territories: A Practice-centred Approach to User-generated Content Production.
Full text link“Vidding” is the practice of synchronizing a song with excerpts of one or more visual texts (usually a TV series or a cult movie), so to confer new meanings to the video materials. This form of user-generated content usually explores some peculiar aspects of the original materials (the evolution of character or of a relationship), or to confer them new meanings.
Originated within the media fandom ecosystem, the vidding phenomenon has been so far mainly analysed from the points of view of audience reception within fan cultures and of gender and feminist studies. The present preliminary study focuses on the Italian context and aims to explore vidding as a media related production practice. Such perspective brings to the forefront questions concerning the role of digital technologies in the production process, in the distribution of user-generated content, in the emergence of shared aesthetic and stylistic quality criteria, as well as in the circulation of the specific competences required by the practice
S. Tosoni e T.J. Pinch, Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound, 2016
No full textRecensione al libro "Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound" di Simone Tosoni con Trevor Pinch, MIT Press, 2016
Conclusion: Is It Really Possible to Take the Floor (Agnostically) About Refused Knowledge?
Full text linkIntroduction : Current perspectives on communication and media research
No full textThis introductory chapter gives an introduction to the contributions that are part of the edited volume and to its overall theme. It highlights the current trends in European communication and media research and presents insights on the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School that took place from 24 July to 5 August 2017, at the University of Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy
Current Perspectives on communication and media research [Elektronisk resurs]
No full textThis book consists of the intellectual work of the 2017 European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School organized in cooperation with the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. The chapters cover relevant research topics, structured into three sections: “Intertwining public spheres”, “Trajectories of participation”, “From traditional media to networks”. Contributors are: Aida Martori Muntsant, Alvaro Oleart, Annamaria Pulga, Bart Cammaerts, Binakuromo Ogbebor, Erika Theissen Walukiewicz, Fausto Colombo, François Heinderyckx, Hannu Nieminen, Ignacio Bergillos, Kristian Jeff Cortez Agustin, Laura Peja, Leif Kramp, Lorleen Farrugia, Maria Francesca Murru, Michael Skey, Nico Carpentier, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Reinhard Anton Handler, Simone Tosoni, Simone Tosoni, Valentina Turrini, Victor Navarro-Remesal and Zsofia Nagy. The book additionally contains abstracts of 42 doctoral projects that were discussed at the 2017 European Media Communication Doctoral Summer School.</p
- …
