“Post-truth”, the 2016 word of the year, has been defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. In fact, the notion risks becoming little more than a buzzword, given that the epistemic, social, political, and cultural issues at stake behind the current debate on Post-Truth are so numerous, so differentiated and intertwined...

The notion of “canon” within transmedial universes has a problematic nature, which is reflected in the literature about fandom. The imprecision is due in no small part to the lack of a model regarding its workings and nature. To this end, we propose a model based on the spatialization of the structure of transmedia universes in term of centre/periphery relationship, and discuss the canon as one of the modalities to arrange this relationship. The paper illustrates the concept with some examples in universes which feature video-ludic elements at their centers. The analysis allows the emergence of key differences between universes with “ludic” centres with respect to universes with other kinds of centres: namely, that universes with games at their centres feature less stabilized models of canonization and feature peculiar canonizations such as “non-narrative canonization” which is largely based upon the affordances of video-ludic texts.

RÉSUMÉ L’essai parte d’une reconnaissance du rôle joué par les sous-cultures liées à la magie et l’occultisme sur le processus de mise en forme sociale de l’Internet, et ensuite propose une étude de cas détaillés sur la façon dont le réseau est en train de remodeler les formes de connaissances magiques. On a analysé en particulier les pratiques de production et de partage du système de croyance de la sous-culture typique des Otherkin, l’une des formes les plus récentes du techno-paganisme, née et répartie principalement sur le réseau. Ces pratiques de production de la connaissance partagée semblent en fait suvre de près les caractéristiques de la communauté Open Source, avec des répercussions sur la forme précise de la culture magique dans son ensemble. Le sous-cultures magiques apparaissent ainsi non seulement jouer un rôle dans le processus de développement des dernières technologies de communication (toujours l’un des principaux moteurs du processus de modernisation), mais elles semblent aussi touchées par le processus général de transformation culturel en acte, apparaissant très différentes de l’‘immobile résidu pré-moderne’ décrit par le paradigme de la modernisation. L’étude de la relation entre les nouveaux médias et la magie est donc une contribution à la tentative en cours par les sciences sociales de déconstruire la représentation idéologique de la modernité occidentale comme un processus unique de rationalisation systématique en faveur d’une vision plus complexe de transformation, typique de la modernité occidentale. SUMMARY This essay moves from a recognition of the role played by subcultures related to magic and occult on the process of social shaping of the Internet, and then propose a detailed case study on how the network is reshaping the forms of magical knowledge. In particular, the paper addresses the production and sharing practices of the belief system typical of the Otherkin subculture, one of the newest forms of techno-paganism, mainly born and spread on the network. These production practices of shared knowledge appear in fact closely following those typical of the open source community, with repercussions on the form of the magical culture as a whole. The magical subcultures appear so not only to play a role in the processes of development of the latest communication technologies (one of the main drivers of the modernization process), but they also seem affected by the ongoing general processes of cultural transformation, thus appearing very different from the ‘immobile residual pre-modern’ described by the paradigm of modernization. The study of the relationship between new media and magic is thus a contribution to the attempt, by the social sciences, to deconstruct the ideological representation of Western modernity as a univocal process of systematic rationalization in favor of a more complex view of the transformation processes typical of the Western modernity.

Per un’analisi sociologica della contemporaneità è sempre più difficile esimersi dall’affrontare due grandi tematiche. La prima è quella dei media. La seconda è quella della città...

In the course of the 1990s, the academic reflection on the communication mediated by the computer has substantially set the theme of sociability and of the relations in the network in terms of community: it is the theme of virtual community, a theme which is strongly marked by a techno-utopic ideology. In the first place, this article covers the history of Internet Studies, in an attempt to identify the detailed rules and guidelines which determined the centrality of the subject of virtual community, indicating among these, in particular, the implicit space metaphor with which the researchers thought about the network in the course of the 1990s. Secondly, it shows how, despite the crisis of the paradigm centered on this metaphor, and despite several attempts, the Community approach has not been entirely abandoned. The virtual community continues to build, often in an implicit way, a model in the light of which we can read – and assess – the forms of social life, and the relations taking life, even through the network, with the risk of not to seizing the specificity and the complexity of new emerging events.