Maria Francesca Murru

Utilisation des réseaux socionumériques par les jeunes européens

L’utilisation des reseaux socionumeriques est sans doute l’activite en ligne qui enregistre actuellement la croissance la plus rapide parmi les jeunes. Cet article presente de nouvelles conclusions pan-europeennes du projet EU Kids Online sur la facon dont les enfants et les jeunes exploitent les possibilites des reseaux peer-to-peer offertes par les reseaux socionumeriques, en se basant sur une enquete menee aupres d’environ 25 000 jeunes (1 000 enfants de chacun des 25 pays de l’Union europeenne). Globalement, 59 % des jeunes internautes europeens âges de 9 a 16 ans disposent de leur propre profil sur un site de reseau social. Malgre des craintes, couramment exprimees, de voir la vie des jeunes entierement exposee en public, la moitie ont moins de cinquante contacts, la plupart des contacts sont des personnes que l’enfant connait deja personnellement, et plus de deux tiers ont des profils prives ou partiellement prives. L’objectif de l’analyse est donc de comprendre quand et pourquoi certains enfants cherchent a elargir leurs cercles de contacts en ligne, et pourquoi certains preferent devoiler leur intimite plutot que proteger leur vie privee. L’etude montre que les differences demographiques entre les enfants, les facteurs culturels dans les differents pays, et les affordances specifiques des reseaux socionumeriques ont tous une influence sur l’elaboration des pratiques en ligne des enfants en matiere de vie privee, d’identite et de connexions sociales.

“I Can Share Politics But I Don’t Discuss It”: Everyday Practices of Political Talk on Facebook

The article explores how a group of young people in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom experience and manage informal political talk on Facebook. Based on 60 interviews with 14- to 25-year-olds with diverse interest and participation in politics, it understands political talk as a social achievement dependent on the situational definition, shaped by the perceived imagined audiences, shared expectations, and technological affordances. Results show that young people construct different interactional contexts on Facebook depending on their political experiences, but also on their understanding of the affordances of networked publics as shaped by the social norms of their peer groups. Many youth define Facebook as an unsafe social setting for informal political discussions, thus adhering to a form of “publicness” aimed at neutralizing conflicts. Others, instead, develop different forms of “publicness” based on emergent communicative skills that help them manage the uncertainty of social media as interactional contexts.

Bridging the gap between micro and macro forms of engagement: three emerging trends in research on audience participation

This chapter aims to make sense of current intersections between audiences’ micro- and macro acts of political engagement. First, we note the dynamics that are at work in the renewed field of micro-politics, made of a daily-life engagement with civic meanings and practice, and with the relentless transformation of mediated civic cultures. Second, we consider the impact that the micro has on macro-politics like organised and institutionalised collective action. The aim of this contribution is to analyse the kind of dis/connections which are supposed to interlace the ordinary politics of media practices with the macro processes of democratic activism.

Stakeholder discourses about critical literacies and audience participation

The next section of this book looks into the horizons that lie ahead for audiences, a short while from today, towards 2030. In chapters 11 through to 14, colleagues will look at key societal drivers of future change, such as the increasing ubiquity of connected gadgets attendant to the Internet of Things, and critical concerns around datafication and the arrival of Big Data. In this chapter, we conclude presenting work on the here and the now, hereby presenting outcomes from the stakeholder consultation part of our foresight work. We distil and discuss themes that emerged from stakeholder interviews around micro and macro forms of action, the inherent technological implications, ensuing academic social responsibilities, and the relevance of investing in critical thinking as part of critical literacies, more broadly, as a fundamental component for positive action. These findings, around the importance of critical literacies, irrespective of technological conditions, resonate into the very futures that The Future of Audiences considers in the chapters that follow.

Italie : Une analogie avec l'espagne

Cet article constitue l’un des elements d’un dossier comparatif international sur le traitement mediatique de l’attentat survenu a la gare d’Atocha a Madrid en mars 2004. Centre sur l’Italie et base sur l’etude d’un corpus des quatre principaux quotidiens, il analyse les orientations du discours developpe par cette presse dans les jours qui ont suivi cet evenement. Il montre, qu’apres un moment de compassion devant les consequences dramatiques de l’attentat, ces titres se sont determines sur la base d’une analogie entre la situation politique espagnole et la situation italienne et ceci en raison des positions identiques de leurs gouvernements quant au conflit en Irak. Des divergences de tons et d’attitude sont observables entre ces differents journaux, mais on assiste globalement a une forme de banalisation et de « nationalisation » de l’evenement progressivement replie sur la scene nationale.