The contemporary media environment is characterized by a high degree of complexity. Users move across different media outlets and digital platforms, and media consumption practices are entangled with other everyday practices. However, this does not imply that everyone uses every existing media outlet or digital platform. Different elements may play a role in media choice and attention location...

The essay aims to highlight the complex theme of media relations and crisis within the history of the Italian media system. The perspective used here makes possible a new periodization of the national media system, one that goes beyond the monomedial perspectives that are largely prevalent today...

The investigation here proposed takes into examination the «Corriere della Sera» and the daily paper free press «Metro» for a three-months’ period. The times when Internet was a new technology, to be explained, are over. The question now is, what are today in Italy the social discourses on the net. The representation of Internet appears today pulverized in the routine discourses of the media, on one side given for granted inside the more general talks on the media system, on the other side keeping a dimension of ‘novelty’ that guarantees the its being part of the news. The central knots around which the discourses on the net are condensed are: 1) Internet as a tecno-economic element, 2) as a dangerous place, 3) as an arena of fun and diversion. Vice versa, in contrast with the emancipative rhetoric still permeating other social discourses on the net, the debate on themes such as the social share and politics through Internet, the access and the use of the computer resources, the governance of the tool are almost entirely missing.

The coming of the digital terrestrial television in Italy was accompanied by a thick network of social issues that in various ways have built and promoted it as a technology endowed with innovative characteristics, able to transform the experience of television and to satisfy specific needs for interaction and participation. In this launching and promotional phase of the service and of the necessary devices to access it, which also had economic characteristics, the attention obviously concentrated more on the production and offer side than on that of consumption; the audience was taken into account from a potential point of view. The essay faces an analysis of the television audience which is busy in domesticating the digital terrestrial platform facing the horizon of consumption, not only through the simple act of purchasing, the simple usage or the interpretation of its meaning, but collocating it in a circular process with a number of phases including both the pre-determination of consumption on the production side and its integration in the consumer’s everyday life. The essay exposes an explorative, ethnographic and multi-situated research which has extended the observation to a variety of contexts, supporting negotiation in the family group (through interviews to 31 persons in 12 domestic units) or in other contexts in which the decision to adopt or not Dtt is taken: from one side the sales points, from the other the condominium meetings. The essay, therefore, analyzes the appropriation forms of Dtt between 2005 and 2006, highlighting the conceptualization of the medium in the imaginary phase, the modalities of appropriation, the incorporation practices and levels. It can be therefore noticed how Dtt is ‘domesticated’ in the form of integration to the traditional television, collocating it inside the evolution line of the television medium and excluding, in this phase, the reference to the wider field of ICTs.

The concept of the digital divide, on which many institutions and scholars have been focusing since the 1990s, has in most cases been considered in terms of availability of technology, comparing those who have versus those who do not have the opportunity to use Information and Communication Technologies. This vision has delineated a geography of the phenomenon and prompted a series of local measures which do not take into account the true complexity unhomogeneity of the scenario. This essay underlines the need to focus on the use of technology, promoting studies that encompass the sociological, cultural, political and economic framework. Taking into consideration local contexts and people in addition to the purely technological dimension, represents a valid starting point for digital inclusion policies: from the tendency to transfer to disadvantaged regions the media and technologies that have proved to be most successful in the industrialised areas, to strategies aiming at getting individuals and communities able to pursue sustainable development and an improvement in their quality of life. An approach considering ICT not for their own sake but as tools was adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva in 2003, during which a firm commitment was undertaken to «transform the digital divide into a digital opportunity for everyone».

Primo fascicolo del 2020