RICERCA ITALIANA     

Imaginaries of transition of the cultural industry and the network society

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract

The proposed research regards a highly discussed theme in the contemporary social sciences—the process of crisis and the problematic reconstruction of the social ties, "disembedding" and "re-embedding." This theme will be defined in more operative terms by using not only field research but also the technique of privileged observation in regards to communication and fashion.
Without neglecting, simply consciously setting aside, the critical importance played by other factors within this process, this research will aim to demonstrate the process of identity transformation in regards to culture and communications, with these research objectives in mind:
- the drive for the change of identities, the new relationship between the "self" and the community owed to the transition from the media generalists to the new media, and the creation of new forms of aggregation and community, a result of the recent communication technologies;
- the fashion trends as the privileged site of the encounter between the mass and individual identity, to be analyzed both in respect to the recent waves of proliferating styles, as well as in respect to the current crisis in the Italian system;
- the perception of emergency (both in the way emergency is represented by the media, as well as in the way it is assimilated by the public), as a "frame" of experience that instigates and encourages the questioning of identity as well as a vehicle to new communities;
- the tendencies and the tasks of the institutional communications, seen as a possible means to an exit from the identity crises
Dividing the duties between different work units as well as through a constant dialogue between different approaches and methodologies, this research aims to furnish a comprehensive vision of the process of transformation of identities and furthermore of the state of such identity transformation in the contemporary Italian culture. <<<

Principal Investigator

Alberto ABRUZZESE Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

Research Objectives

The object of this research is to establish the current state of a process of crisis and reconstruction of the social ties. Sociology has extensively codified this process, but an empirical and analytical research has rarely been conducted. A wide ranging transformation is questioning the foundations of the shared identities on all levels of experience, i.e. the spread of short terms contacts within the organization of labor; the new "movement" aggregations within the political life; the shattering of stiles within the cultural life. Naturally, every research project must isolate a single portion of reality to analyze, and we have chosen to concentrate on the relationship between the communication-fashion-culture, furthermore singling out the communication as the fundamental theme. The reason for this decision is twofold. Firstly, the communication technologies are the fulcra of change within the contemporary society being the instruments of innovation and modernization. Secondly, the forms of communication are the privileged sites for the negotiation of meaning—they are the space where the identities, stripped of their traditional meanings are re-discussed. In other words, the media are not the factors of change, but the factors of integration (cultural frames).
With this in mind, the objective of the project is to supply a scientifically precise measurements of this process through the analysis of: the passage from the media generalists to the new media to be examined qualitatively on the public; the fashion trends as a historical device destined to mediate between the collective and individual identities; the institutional communication (through the Florence case) as attempt to define a "media identity" in transition from the traditional culture to new modes of digital communication. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The transition from the collective identities of the mass culture to the individualized identities of a new historical phase defined either as the age of "new media" or as age of "personal capitalism" is the polemic theme of this research. Looking to concentrate on the various aspects of the process of "dis-embedding" of the social structure, the attention will be placed on the media, the system of fashion and the institutional communication.
The main objective of the research is to discover the intermediate point between the two extreme solutions—the modern uniformity and the postmodern total breaking apart. Inspired by Habermas' "Theory of communicative act" in which he argues that the process of transformation should be researched and analyzed empirically and pragmatically. The fundamental theoretical premises of the work are two:
1. The discussion of the collective identities naturally bases itself on Durkheim's "The elementary forms of the religious life" as well as on the conception of culture as a form of society's self-representation. That the cultural and communicative events do not have an instrumental role, but are rather a fundamental value within the structure of society is in fact the premise for the research of the media identities. Durkheim's paradigm will be interpreted according to these different theoretic lines:
-In general, the reading of Durkheim will be fenomenological, which will allow us "objectify" and "lock" the social forms in order to concentrate rather on a more concrete negotiation of meaning. This is a meaningful passage, considering that the culture is demonstrating always more clearly its "ideological" nature (Mannheim) and unveiling its dependency on the tensions in the social fabric;
-We will attempt to apply Serge Moscovici's concept of "social representations" basing such a reading to concrete examples of the processes of social exchange;
-Of great importance is the Habermas' reading of Durkheim, in particular the "change of paradigm";
-Finally, knowing that a discussion of identity is always also "political" in nature, we will anchor ourselves in Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined community". During the course of the research, it will be interesting to evaluate the transmigration of identities from the physical space to which they were tied, as well as the possibility to construct new "imagined communities" through telecommunications.

2. The departure point for the discussion of the "partial" identities will be the "Cultural Studies" which have broken the veil of the "spirit of time" and shown that the society is constructed by one continuous struggle (tension), and a clash between the symbologies and the sub-cultural world visions.
We will use this theoretic, aware of its contemporary limitations, believing that the "plurality" of cultural worlds is not a form of subversion of the rules of the society as a whole, but rather that the society is constituted precisely by this plurality. This is a particularly effective approach at this moment of visible sliding of social identities, whereby the system appears based on differences instead on homogeneity, and oddly enough seems to locate within these differences its strength. The focus of our research will be to individuate empirically precisely the paradoxical reason for the system consistency.
In particular, we will follow two specializations of the School of Birmingham: The "media studies" and the "fashion studies" (which have given a new nourishment to the research of fashion, understood as the ideal vehicle for massification and individualization of taste). <<<