Matteo Tarantino

Media territories and urban conflict Exploring symbolic tactics and audience activities in the conflict over Paolo Sarpi, Milan

This article deals with the media-related practices enacted by social actors during urban conflict. Its theoretical objective is to stress the need for audience studies to focus on social actors’ concrete practices and, consequently, to switch from essentialist notions of ‘audiences’ to ‘audiencing’ as a practice. This makes it necessary to build theoretical and methodological bridges between audience and urban studies. Focusing on a conflict between Chinese migrants and Italian residents in an area of Milan, the article employs the concept of ‘media territories’ to account for the heterogeneous assemblages of media platforms, contents and devices mobilised by social actors to make sense of the conflict and to impose their own representations of the self, of competitors and of urban space. Within these assemblages, audiencing forms an important ‘secondary’ activity, whose sense can be understood only in relation to the other practices involved. The exploration of these assemblages is necessary for coming to grips with social actors’ conflictual media practices, and to understand the dynamics of urban conflict in media-saturated contexts.

Authoritarianism, Opacity and Proxies: The 2008 Olympic Torch Relay in the Italian Media

The study explores the representations enacted by Italian media around the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay, based on a sample of newspaper articles, television news programmes and online materials. While an explicit contrast between Olympic values and the concurrent violence due to the 2008 Tibetan crisis offered the main frame in Italian media, the study advances the hypothesis that these discourses simply gave new form to longer-standing representations about China, revolving around key notions of ‘opaqueness’ and ‘authoritarianism’. This ‘radically other’ China and the Olympics (embodied in the torch) are continuously described as ‘incompatible’, while in the process offering a number of actors (public opinion, media and industries) a rare chance for self-definition in opposition to the ‘other’. In this sense, the Tibetan issue appears to be used as a proxy to speak about broader issues, often related to the ongoing economic competition between Italy and China.

The Good, The Fake & The Cyborg: The Broadcast and Coverage of Beijing 2008 Olympics in italy

This essay explores the representations of the 2008 Beijing Olympics enacted by Italian media through the analysis of a corpus of printed and television materials. After an overall analysis of the agenda setting, reception and content division of the whole games, we focus on four specific case studies (the opening ceremony; the US–China basketball match; the Liu Xiang incident; and the closing ceremony). Representations of Chinese athletes and of Olympic events consistently appear as political in nature and critical in tone; a powerful framing of China as an ‘opaque authoritarian’ country appears to inform the whole corpus, irrespective of each mediums specific ideological orientation. Within this frame even Chinas successes (both sporting and organizational) are read as either counterfeit or as unfair. Paradoxically, then, the very extent of those successes appear to aggravate the problematic image of China socialized by Italian media.

Toward a New “Electrical World”: Is There a Chinese Technological Sublime?

Drawing from multiple disciplines and from empirical work, the chapter attempts to establish a broad frame for the cultural meaning assigned to computer technology by Chinese culture. Using as a key concept Leo Marx and Vincent Mosco’s formulation of the technological sublime, the chapter discusses its dynamics on the Western context. Here, the technological sublime feeds from the man/nature duality and the nostalgia for a transcendental state of unity. Narrations about the technology being able to bridge this gap assume the form of “techno-myths” and structure Western technological imaginary. The chapter then discusses the dynamics in Chinese context. Here, man and nature are not in a dichotomy, and the unity state is not transcendental but immanent. Therefore, technology has never been symbolically invested until the Opium Wars’ trauma. The chapter employs Chinese science fiction to illustrate this dynamic. Henceforth, the chapter argues, technology in China has been connected with the idea of national rebirth – at least at the elite level. In its last part, the chapter illustrates thorough an empirical case how this frame shapes the social meaning of computer technology.

Database Green: Software, Environmentalism and Data Flows in China

Significant efforts towards environmental transparency have been made by the Chinese government since 2008. This paper focuses on the technical decisions shaping a database of official pollution information built and operated by a Chinese NGO known as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). Issues of standardization, power distribution and institutional fragmentation are discussed. The paper illustrates a case of NGOs integrating enforcement capabilities as data centres amidst the growing reliance on processes of informational governance of environmental issues.

Sull'eterna discontinuità : ipotesi per una socio-semiotica della comunicazione esterna

co della comunicazione esterna, intesa come il complesso di strategie pubblicitarie mirate a raggiungere il destinatario al di fuori dell’abitazione. Si intende qui seguire un percorso alternativo rispetto alla gran parte della letteratura esistente sul tema, orientata verso il marketing, dove la riflessione appare tendenzialmente orientata verso scopi utilitaristici, in particolare verso la definizione di criteri di efficacia al fine di poter oggettivamente misurare il ritorno degli investimenti. La metodologia resta rigidamente quantitativa, anche laddove facciano capolino prospettive diverse; approcci qualitativi su base socio-antropologica sono più frequenti nell’analisi di case history specifiche, con particolare riferimento ai gender studies. Questo saggio intende muoversi invece nella direzione di esaminare in prospettiva socio-semiotica la peculiare natura del segno della comunicazione esterna e dei fenomeni a questa natura legati.