Forme culturali tra mediologia e comunicazione

The close relationship between the reality of media and cultural forms can be read according to a double way of research. 1. A tradition of studies that has recently found a unit name in the concept of media studies. Media studies mean to think about media as place of the contemporary experience, as land of production and negotiation of expressive languages and symbolic forms, as ambit for building paths of meaning, both individual and collective, as places for the cognitive and corporeal living; real worlds, which in other occasion I have called media-mondo. 2. A second possibility of research is to observe the problem from a privileged place: communication, ambit able to show the developmental synchrony between media and society. In this way the media cultures are emergent forms of the coupling media/society, places where the fact that the individual takes upon itself the features of the contemporary social world gets visible, takes over the developmental strategies of the social world, its languages: a. the contingency a condition that is neither of impossibility nor of necessity, where all games are open and, at the same time, unpredictable ; b. the virtuality a condition of life where we can actually think about ourselves in an abstract way thanks to the potentialities of the technique and the familiarization with the technological imagery made and supported by media, a condition by which every single aspect of the life is perceived and acted as possible otherwise. In the intersection between approach founded on media studies and communication, we can observe the media cultures as universes stretched between forms of expressiveness, oriented to creativity and manifestation of individual freedom, and the industrial forms of the imagery where experiences, by orienting themselves to the contingency, get away from the bodies.

Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Forme culturali tra mediologia e comunicazione in "SOCIOLOGIA DELLA COMUNICAZIONE " 35-36/2004, pp , DOI: