The Italian Sense of the Web. A Social History of the Culture of Connectivity: A Mediatization Approach

This paper aims to analyze the italian culture of connectivity, produced by the interrelation of social media and social ties evolution, by highlighting the dynamics of power and participation and overcoming the dichotomy between the “manipulative” and “democratization” media theses. The essay therefore focuses on the specific transition between web 1.0 and web 2.0 tracing a change, worked by the spread of social networking platforms, in the discourses on the social sense of connectivity: in other words, reconstructing an history of technological and communicative transformations coupled with specific events capable of producing a different social consciousness of connectivity. The approach adopted to analyze this transition in terms of the social history of the media will be periodization, while the mediatization approach will serve as the broader framework for understanding and interpreting the relation between the spread of the social media and the evolution of a sense of social ties as an expression of culture of connectivity. In specific terms, linking the periodization perspective to the mediatization angle will involve taking the temporal dimension into account on at least three levels: an events-based, micro-type temporality, capable of identifying specific media events or widespread media practices; a meso-type temporality, marked by a succession of media waves which underline the disruptive effect of certain ecosystemic configurations of media devices, capable of significantly altering both market and cultural dimensions; a macro-temporal dimension, suitable for tracing a succession of technological ages, such as the passage described in the literature as the transition from the age of the industrial revolution to the information or digital age. This framework provided by the mediatization used through a periodization approach to digital evolution in Italy has enabled us to detect – in the context of a long-term perspective on the digital age – the countercyclical role of digital in Italy which, especially in the mid-period, both fostered and characterized the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. More specifically, by adopting a short-term, evenemential logic to analyze the time span from 2009 to 2014, it has proved possible to trace the way in which the mediatization of the social tie, achieved by the diffusion of web 2.0 in Italy, resulted in a swift transition from a rhetoric of “friendship” to a rhetoric of “participation” which was widely perceived as becoming, in a political sense, increasingly critical.