RICERCA ITALIANA     

Media and Generations in Italian Society

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Abstract

The research is aimed at exploring the issue of the relationship between media and generations in Italy, intending to contribute towards the understanding of the complex “generation social construction”, intended as the cohorts’ process of genesis and self-recognizing where biographical and historical traits, social discourse and reflexivity continuously intersect.
The aim of the project is to understand from a theoretical standpoint the role of the generation within the field of cultural production and consumption; from an empirical point of view the final objective of the research shall be to delineate a semantic of the different generations, in order to build a typologization of the several relational forms they can institute with the media and their offer, able to show the complex constellations of meanings that lead heterogeneous individuals to recognize themselves in communicative terms as a generation.
The research spans three wide, strictly intertwined areas, with the integration between theoretical perspectives and statistical data as well as between non-standard sociological research tools and textual analysis of both socio-semiotic and content approch:

1. Background research in order to build the research’s theoretical and interpretative frames;
2. Field research for deep exploration of generational identitary backgrounds in relation with the media system, featuring a qualitative survey multi-oriented:
a. On the geographic and urban centre typology levels (Milan and Rome metropolitan areas as well as tiny-middle towns over the whole nation)
b. On the generational belonging level (four different generational cohorts: those born between 1940 and 1952; those born between 1953 and 1965; those born between 1966 and 1978; those between 1979 and 1985)
c. On the research objects level ("domestication" processes of the different media; articulation of media diets; appropriation of cultural and media items, and of their contents and languages; social representations of the media)
d. On the research methodologies level (both individual and group non-structured deep interviews, non-directively conducted)

In particular, spanning Milan, Rome and a handful of urban centres across the nation, 36 natural groups (9 for each generational cohort, where the group members have shared events characterizing a peculiar intertwining between individual and collective biography) and 48 individual interviews (12 for each generational cohort) to biographical interesting subjects and exposed to some of the media text analysed in the desk research (point 3) will take place.

3. Desk research, articulated over three levels of analysis:
a. Online communication analysis, in order to highlight the presence of a generational semantics
b. Re-construction of the cultural consumption of Generation X, through both quantitative data as well as socio-semiotic analisys of products that are relevant for this generation’s identity
c. Content analysis of mass-culture literary products (the focus will be on popular narratives), aimed at depicting a first outlook on the social representations and self-representations of generations and their relationships.

With respect to each unit’s responsibilities the project shall be articulated as follows:

- point 1 shall take place in unit I
- point 2 shall be conducted jointly by the units I, II and V;
- point 3 shall be conducted by the unit II (3.a), IV (3.b) and III (3.c).

In order to grant the uninterrupted monitoring of the work, the central unit will schedule:

- one starting international workshops and periodical meetings taking place during the development of the research wotrk
- the development of a tool for self-evaluation.

The findings dissemination will be guaranteed by
- the proceedings of the workshop;
- an international conference at the end of the research;
- the publishing of a collective volume;
- the publishing of four articles, two on national journals and two on international ones. <<<

Principal Investigator

Fausto Colombo Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Research Objectives

The research intends to explore the issue of the relationship between media and generations in Italy. The following objectives are to be focused upon:

- understanding from a theoretical standpoint the role of the generation within the field of cultural production and consumption, starting with the analysis of cultural and media products (such as novels, movies, comic books, music…), in order to build a typology apt to probe the many relational forms between cultural field and the notion of generation. The goal set is thus to reach a wider and more formal understanding of the application of this concept within the cultural field through a typologization capable of highlight the distinctive traits leading to the application – in both common as well as critical discourses - of the concept of “generational” to media and cultural products;

- Exploration of the emergence of a generational semantics through scrutiny of online communications, on the light of an interpretation of the Net as a whole – from www to chat to newsgroups to RSS – as a cradle for communications on any other medium;

- Empirical enquiring of the relationship between generational belonging and media (old and new), in terms of both each generation’s media experience (with respect to the single medium and to the inner equilibriums of the media diet – itself constituted by the complex relationship between products and consumption/fruition forms) and in terms of representations of the media themselves each generation provides (their role, importance in society and in the individuals life, and so on);

- Textual and empirical exploration of the relationship between generational belonging and media products, in relation to specific cultural objects as well as in terms of genres and themes articulation. Two specific segments are to be extensively probed, as they privilege
a) From one side, analysis and reception of an handful of cultural products, “produced” and “consumed” in various ways by a specific generational cohort - born in the late sixties – aimed at make the dynamism tying production, consumption and generational imaginary to elements such as historical periodization, individual biography and inter-generational dialectics, vividly stand out.
b) From the other side, analysis and reception of a successful discourse genre like popular “pink” literature; that is to say, novels, in general published weekly, that, although ignored by newspapers’ literary pages, are widely read by a non-necessarily female-only audience. The evergreen-ess of this literary production, which obliges one to discard “trend” attributes and think of them as middle-period cultural tendency (in sharp contrast with the modernity supposedly pervading the media system) reminds us not only of Mannheim’s “non-contemporaneousness of the contemporaneous”, but also of the possibility for cultural dissonances in media consumption, which are perceived as such by the researcher but not necessarily by the consumers.
In particular, two sub-goals are to be pursued:
a) drawing a map of cultural consumptions (literary, cinematographic and musical) of the chosen generational cohort and empirically verifying their social incorporation. The choice of operating on a specific generational slice of those born between 1966 and 1978 is grounded upon several factors, not the least of which the fact that this is the first generation to be clearly defined by its cultural consumptions (MTV Generation) and to be labelled from a cultural product (the Generation X novel by Douglas Coupland);
b) re-constructing social representations and self-representations of the generations themselves and of the relationships among them spreading and imposing through popular narrativity, in order to verify which generations are present in the texts, how they are defined, what attributes they are conferred, what relationships among them are described.

Integration of the above illustrated goals should offer a relevant contribution towards the understanding of the complex “generation social construction”, intended as the cohorts’ process of genesis and self-recognizing where biographical and historical traits, social discourse and reflexivity continuously intersect.

The research’s final objective shall be to delineate a semantics of the different generations, in order to build a typologization of the several relational forms they can institute with the media and their offer, able to show the complex constellations of meanings that lead heterogeneous individuals to recognize themselves in communicative terms as a generation. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The topic of the relationship between sociologically-intended generations and media appears right from the start both widely complex and at the same time ripe of perspectives and insights.
Complexity is already present in the most credited sociological definitions, from Dilthey’s (“a group of individuals who lived at the same time an historical event both determinant and unique, hence drawing their moral framework and sense of sharing a common destiny” Gallino 1978:318) to the genealogic conception, which reduces the generation notion to the degree of biological ascendance or descent with respect to a chosen individual; to the demographic one, which sees a generation as a cohort of individuals born within the same time span (approximately twenty years), in the same stage of their life-cycle, sharing the relative social position as well as being objected to the same evaluations by the other cohorts, being exposed to “social, cultural, psychological experiences roughly similar – and different from other generations’ ” ; to the purely temporal one, which measures a generation over the thirty years span (conventionally?) separating an individual’s birth from the moment he reaches the reproductive stage.

From Donati’s relational sociology comes an interesting suggestion about the possibility of a multi-dimensional vision of the category of “generation”, where biographical traits shall coexist alongside with historical, biographical and cultural ones; a vision where age group belonging is connected to specific historical experiences, to the development of peculiar consumption habits or to the occupation of certain positions in the family chain.
Such a multi-dimensional category appears particularly useful within a theoretical and research paradigm, in which the different segmentations of the consumer body (audiences in this case) cannot be reduced to either individual socio-demographic traits (such as age, gender, education, job position) or the corresponding life styles (such as those codified by marketing), but have to be strictly and simultaneously related to several factors – such as one’s position along the life course, media biography, contexts provided by families and friendship networks as environments for the elaboration of media experience, the belonging to a world of values shared with other members of the same generation, the historical development of the media system, the different phases of technological innovation, the processes of taming and incorporation of technologies and media products, as well as the wider structural changes affecting the social and cultural system.
Following Pilcher (1994), we shall suggest the adoption of the term “social generation” to denote this multi-dimensional category.
Karl Mannhem’s elaboration (The Generation Problem, 1952) appears obviously useful in highlighting many important points. Mannheim’ proposal is aimed at overcoming both the opposition between the positivistic and the romantic concept of generation, as well as the one between biological-natural and intellectual facet, through a more articulated notion that, on the light of a formal dynamic applied sociology, distinguishes between “generation placement”, “generation bond”, and “generation unit”. The generation placement is a simple bond among individuals who, being born in the same period, occupy the same social space; thus the generation differentiates itself from the formation of concrete groups based on either communitarian structures (family, tribe, lineage) or associational ones (groups built around an intentionally subscribed goal, law, or rule). Each location can thus be associated with an inclination towards behaviours, feelings, action and thought models; furthermore, the concrete forms of those stances and contents proceed from the very “history of the location they were born - and stabilized into a tradition - into” (id.: 259). The generation bond represents something more than collocation, a further tie: ” this bond could be defined simply as the participation to the common destinies of this social-historical unit” (id. 269). A generation bond should be thought as an actualization of the potential implicated in the simple location.
The very generation units (which can take the form of concrete groups) are grounded upon the sharing of this bond. Affinity among the individuals pertaining to the same generation unit manifests itself in the sharing of the common contents forming individual consciences and acting as in-group socializing factors: in a word, the Gestalt - the peculiar way of perceiving, interpreting and evaluating social, historical, and cultural phenomena. The singular generation units manifest themselves within concrete groups, themselves nucleuses of larger, not necessarily contiguous groupings, characterized by the sharing of a context and of events that are experienced, perceived and reactively evaluated within the Gestalt itself, “an affine pulsation and configuration of individuals within a generation” (id.: 273).
Michael Corsten (1999) builds his commentary on Mannheim around the focalization on the feeling of generational belonging: what is it based upon? How does it develop and sustain itself?
To find an answer to these questions he refers to the concept of semantic history (Luhman, 1980; Koselleck, 1969), that is, the idea that a generation recognizes itself as such when it is able to produce a dominant order of meanings continuously empowered through the discourse practices among the members of the generation itself.
Generational semantics is, in other words, a stock of themes, interpretative models, evaluation principles and linguistic devices through which shared experience is thematized and transformed in discourse within the forms of daily interaction. It can be read as a process of crystallization of a generation’s encyclopaedia and the linguistic rules employed to consult it, as well as a social contraction: the cultural circle of a generation is not a real, concrete group of individuals; it is not a generation-unit but a bond, that is to say, in Mannheim’s terms, a finite number of coetaneous individuals who “spontaneously observe that other people use certain criteria for interpreting and articulating topics in a similar manner to themselves” (Corsten 1999: 262).
Corsten returns on the topic of Mannheim’s age of adolescence, furtherly expanding the nature –not only biological but also historical and social - of this segment of the life-cycle, in which the issue of personal identity is felt with particular urgency and prominence. Experiences lived during adolescence are important in defining the We-Sense of a generation, not so much because the age is in itself more “sensitive” or “impressionable”, but because the common historical, social and cultural context provides a wide group of adolescents with the same devices to define their own individual self – starting from the very generational semantic that makes up the common language as well as the thematic repertoire to reflect one’s forming identity with.

The debate over the notion of generation so far roughly summarized thrillingly stimulates media research, especially in confronting with some of the latest trends in media studies, in which a substantial agreement has been reached on the central role of the individuals in fruition dynamics.

Indeed, fruition analysis attains an high relevance in this perspective, both as effect and “cause” of generational belongings, as well as in identity building processes.
Audience research today is not to be connoted merely as an “objective” or “external” observation of the fruition experience, but as a reconstruction of fruition itself starting from the media consumer’s point of view. Within this conceptual "frame", generation analysis is able to highlight the very “reflexivity” of the audience and to articulately grasp the complexity of consumption processes.
Another important theoretical perspective, descending from British and north-European Cultural And Media Studies, is the one relying upon the concept of “interpreting communities” as a definition and interpretation tool for consumption (not exclusively mediatic) dynamics. Such a notion appears highly useful for the analysis of the generational cohorts, even more so if framed in a territorial perspective (such as metropolitan/non-metropolitan).

What is the sense the relationship between generations and media can be thus read under?
It can be said that the latter represent for society both a stock of available themes and, through media cultural products, a possibility for individual reflexivity. In this sense, media experiences constitute a collective background, both imagined and imaginary, inscribing individual experience within a hypothetical generational background, which the media represent. Within this framework, the perspectives so far outlined can be connected to the research on social semantics and communication networks.
This research essentially consists in the analysis of the topics featured by communicative networks. In today’s functionally-differentiated society, the media system’s role appears of particular interest. This system holds indeed a delicate double role: on one side, being naturally constituted by a communicative network leaving recognizable tracks (i.e. books and newspapers for the press, movies for cinema), it appears as an ideal place where to explore semantics; on the other side, in this place a large part of “social reality” constructs and re-constructs itself.
Communication technologies (or diffusion media, in social system theory’s specific terms) thanks to their memorization-supporting and information-recovering features, do crystallize communication themes, thus rendering them observable and analyzable well beyond the regular conversation flow. The relevance of this facet, already manifest in relation to the mass media system, increases with the advent of computer-mediated interpersonal communication. From this perspective, CMC represents an extraordinary opportunity for social and communication sciences. For the first time in history the “communication place” becomes observable; furthermore, the quantity of communication going to be observed and studied through these techniques is steadily increasing – from press-based writing to weblogs to newsgroups. Also, the boost in user-generated content created the opportunity for the emergence of surfacing semantics, themselves quite useful to explore and verify the concept of generational semantics as defined by Michael Corsten.
The topic of generational semantics leads to a further line of thought. In 1973, Harold Bloom published a seminal essay in critical thought, titled The Anxiety of Influence, in which ad “aedypical” model for literary tradition was exposed; according to this model, with respect to literary tradition (the “father” ), creativity was founded upon the dialectics between belonging and departing - that is to say, between originality and tradition. Such model supposedly originates what Bloom called “anxiety of influence”, and crystallizes a notion of culture-making (of producing and canonizing culure) essentially thought as a generational clash; the role of this notion on the literary and cultural scene is here affirmed, or re-affirmed.
The debate Harold Bloom’s essay spawned makes it all the more valuable as a starting point – ifonly to be overcame – to explore the complexity of the “generation” notion applied to the cultural and literary scene, as well as to verify how this concept clashes – exactly as the social field does - with other variables, relevant in describing one’s surrounding universe as well as interpreting it in terms of change.
Indeed, a glance at the cultural field will show how the notions of “generation” and “generational” are applied with widespread unevenness. As an example, we shall consider how texts of various artistic quality and cultural origin (from the literary-artistic circle to mass production) are labelled as “generational” as they depict in real time the dialectic process of a generation’s auto/hetero-nomination through collectively shared themes, styles and contents; other texts are similarly “generational” insofar as they take it upon themselves to define (often ex-post) a generation, contributing to that specific generation’s symbolic and mythographic construction processes (working on memory or on the creation of a mythical, shared past - even re-elaborating traumas, like in the case of Vietnam) or other generations’ ones (highlighting, for example, the differences between present and past). Texts can be generational in the sense of having been best-sellers in a specific time an thus having permeated a generation’s cultural consumptions; also, texts can be defined as generational because they are read, often across different generations, in the formative years. Finally, texts may be labelled as generational because they stage the generational conflict and because they are in themselves the product of a generation and, as such, they are acknowledged in cultural production’s historical periodization. <<<