In contemporary cross-media environments it is increasingly difficult to clearly grasp the behavior of media users, and understand the logic with which they move between legacy media, new media and social media, private and public communication, media consumption and content production. This article aims to provide the main evidences of how Italian Internet users draw on this set of media to meet their communication and daily needs. Built in the frame of the “Peoples’ Internet Project”, the study presents the main results of an online survey about frequency, intensity and purposes of different media uses. Even within the now majority segment of the Italian population that accesses and uses the Internet quite intensely, new media have not replaced the old ones; rather, the latter coexist with the former in new “media constellations”. While some of them (Tv and social media above all) are widespread and frequently used, the metamedium function performed by the Internet also allows the extension of some legacy media in the digital media arena, giving new life to old media.

The contemporary society is countersigned by a progressive substitution of the concept of fear by that of risk, which contemplates the rational possibility of control on the dangerousness of a given phenomenon by the individual and the system. The article starts from the terminological and conceptual distinction between risk and danger, and indicates then two types of communication: the communication of crisis and the communication of the risk. On this last one strongly weighs the communicative intervention of the media. The probability of risk varies as the system ability to know how to react to the emergency situations varies, and not simply with the possibility in itself that the event happens: according to this approach it is therefore necessary to elaborate tools to prevent and check the risks, through the management of the system efficiency, regularizing the information flows among the subjects composing the communicative chain of risk and emergency: institutions, media and citizens. The analysis of a particular case (the diffusion of H5N1 virus – generally known as being responsible for the «avian influence» – in the period included between August 2005 and March 2006, in the informative coverage operated by the «Corriere della Sera» and by the Tg1) allows identifying some problems of risk communication by the Institutions and to verify their consequences in food consumption in Italy. It emerges that the media discourses are very powerful in creating awareness of the danger, but they are contradictory in creating a correct perception of the risk; secondly, the media discourses seem to be weak in driving the consumers’ behaviour: the population manifests a certain distrust towards the evaluation of the risk operated by «expert systems», deciding alone the purchasing behaviour to be adopted. The last part of the article describes a best practice: the planning and realization of a food safety manual edited by an Italian Ministry, starting from the awareness acquired during the avian emergency.

The article starts from the consideration of how the basic and structural role that the family represents in the human experience and in the social fabric exposes it to be the object of consideration of cultural agencies and collective subjects which often represent it according to, partial, when not distorted logics. So the cohabitation of a plurality of discourses about the family, publicly pronounced from different social subjects are able to produce as many images and collective representations of the family. The focusing of this contribution concerns some typologies of social subjects responsible of the media discourses on the family, the ways in which they conceive the family experience and its priorities today, how much they are aware of this subjective perception, what they think it is the common feeling about the family reality, and how this awareness today – together with the with those more strictly professional related to the markets, the languages and the public which they address – enter the process of construction of their discourses, and therefore in the media imagination depending on them. The article examines the aware and unaware conditioning which drive the process of mediation operated by those professional categories of mediators and cultural operators on which depends the production of a real social representation of the family experience: journalists of the printed paper, on one side, fiction scriptwriters and producers advertising creative people, on the other. Every type of family representation produced is investigated; the rules and the inside limitations to the discursive genre and the specific productive system; the awareness level of the operators with respect to such norms and, consequently, the perception of the limitations and inadequacies with respect to the representative, creative, and axiological demands, of the operators themselves A plurality of images of families emerges on one side anchored to the common sense, but showing on the other the plurality of meanings and the changes to which the family is submitted in the present society. Therefore, the strategies of the discursive production on family, according to the considered sector, stir along the axle that almost goes from the adherence almost ‘naturalistic’ to the complexity of the family reality to its fictional transfiguration.

Research on the media in Italy has been focusing since the 1960s on the temporal dimension of television as a crucial element of analysis, stating from the pioneering studies by Umberto Eco and Gianfranco Bettetini on live broadcasts. From that time on this object, between semiotics and sociology, has been investigated through many aspects. In particular, the organisation of the program offer in the shape of the broadcasting schedule, especially in the neotelevision context, has been studied as a condition for a relationship of trust with the spectator, as a self-promotion strategy, or even as an overall discourse created by the broadcaster. In particular, the relation between temporal organisation of the broadcasting schedule and the social structuring of individual and family time has shed light on the mimetic and regulatory nature of television temporality. In addition, the ethnographic turning point has heightened the attention on the way television constitutes an environmental resource through which part of the domestic and family consumption of TV is shaped. As well as fulfilling the function of an interface between the organisation of offer and consumption, the time of television also stands in a relation to long seriality and to the establishment of a veritable flow of programming. Yet, with reference to the fragment, it also bears a relation to micro-texts that contribute to giving shape and body to the broadcasting schedule macrotext. In this sense, it can represent a metaphor of the cultural and social forms of our present time.

Primo fascicolo del 2020