Schermo, habitat, piattaforma. Metafore dell'immaginario della comunicazione = Screen, habitat, platform. Metaphors of the imaginary of communication

Abstract

Over the last forty years, by incarnating the very essence of an increasingly widespread and pervasive symbolic power, communication has acquired an unprecedented centrality. Additionally, over the same period there has been an exponential multiplication of interpretations, readings, studies and research that have affected public and academic debate. Dystopias and fears, fuelled by the historical-political events of the first half of the 20th century and then reinforced in the 1970s by the hypothetical return to powerful media, were first flanked and then hybridised by new conceptions and utopian visions, sometimes simplistic and even populist. This certainly represents a more articulated and complex Weltanschauung, capable of uncovering an evolved imaginary, rich in contradictions due to the many roles and multiple values and functions (even vicarious) acquired by communication itself. In the light of the above premises, this paper aims to suggest a reflection regarding the way some interpretative categories and key concepts of communication, capable of crystallising its specific aspects, have contributed over the last few decades to re-construct its current imaginary. In particular, we seek to analyse the dynamic figuration in which images, meanings and metaphors are stratified and confused, referable to the impact of media on everyday life, to the flourishing of cultural industries, to the gradual domestication of technologies, to the surfacing of a connective and collective intelligence and to a proper utopia of communication. Such imaginary has been marked, in more recent years, by the affirmation of a convergence that also comes to be cultural, as well as by new collective obsessions, by forms of control, homologation, and surveillance.