Sulla mediatizzazione del senso comune

The article investigates the relationships between the concept of common sense (one of the tools and specific matters of sociology in the daily life) and the current communication media, with particular reference to the media that - for convenience we continue to call mass media. In the author’s opinion, the presence of these media is of common sense by now, and in addition the contents and forms of the common sense itself are objects of mediatic competitions. Common sense is important because it represents some assumptions of thought and action that are taken for granted. So the competition for the construction of the common sense is a competition for the definition of what is suggested being obvious- in a society or in a part of it -, and in this way is taken away from the discussion. The construction of the common sense is made by relatively explicit strategies (like for instance the agenda-setting mechanisms), and above all by conversational strategies that can be discovered by suitable social-semiotic analysis. The complexity of the current societies is the reason of the existence of several local common senses, which the differentiation of the medial texts corresponds to. But there is a core of common sense that tends to characterize the current planetary society: around this core the competition among media and for the control on media is today harder.

Paolo Jedlowski, Sulla mediatizzazione del senso comune in "SOCIOLOGIA DELLA COMUNICAZIONE " 37/2005, pp , DOI: