Pina Lalli

Trust, Inequalities and Health Literacy: The Tangle Meeting with Dr Google

The Internet and the social media are becoming important tools for medicine, engaging physicians, patients and their families. Communities on several diseases arise and many providers offer apps for many purposes. Off line social groups still exist, too. This new networked world creates new opportunities but it requires new skills. What challenges for health (digital) literacy? Social media mean a context of networks, not individuals, Then we need research and debate to better understand both the renewed forms on health disparities and the new entangled processes of influence, overcoming the traditional individualistic models of literacy measurement. Key words such as reciprocity, listening, mutual understanding challenging different social representations of health could replace the conventional transmitting model of medical health communication.

Giochi di significato, visibilità e infomediazione: i sentieri interrotti della comunicazione oggi

The article proposes the notion of infomediation as an useful tool for empirical sociological research on the role that new social subjects play today in web communication. After a brief illustration of the contribution of the social sciences for the analysis of the effects and practices of media technologies, especially about the agenda building of the public sphere, the paper describes some examples of the infomediation phenomenon. It assumes from the literature the hypothesis that new technological oligarchic elites are constituting, with strong relationships with other types of elites. Finally, it shows some results and methodological suggestions of a few first empirical researches on the role of Google or Twitter for the newsmaking practices of information.

Rappresentazioni sociali e senso comune. Due itinerari possibili per lo studio della comunicazione quotidiana

This paper essays to compare the concept of common sense, especially as it has been studied by A. Schutz, with the social representations approach proposed by Serge Moscovici. Since social representations have had several empirical applications above all in social psychology but just a little in sociology, we suggest that it is important to discover new possible developments if we understand its sociological perspective. From Durkheims collective representations Moscovici proposes the social representation as phenomenon, showing three principal shifts of his hypothesis: (i) the difference between science and natural language as different worlds where meaning is produced; (ii) the dynamic aspects of social representations; (iii) the crucial role of mass media communication. We find some interesting analogies with the analysis of the social distribution of knowledge described by Shutz and we propose that social representations re-construct common sense in the course of local situations of everyday interaction experience; so they can be regarded as local operators of common sense, by means both of molecular or interpersonal influences and mass communication interpretative effects

Representing Ecology: Nature and Risk in Contemporary Social Communication

The aim of this paper is to present the basic theoretical perspective and some interpretative aspects resulting from a study on social representations of nature, environment and ecology in three European countries, Italy, France and Germany.1 The theoretical core of this study is founded upon the approach of social representations which we can tie above all to the name of Serge Moscovici (1961; 1984). He transformed the Durkheimian concept of collective representations into a ‚social phenomenon‘ in order to single out the process and the dynamics of its mobile and circulating character. Moscovici recovered the ‘structural meaning’ which Emile Durkheim had attributed to collective representations, but reinterpreted it in a more dynamic capacity: he didn’t accept the static feature of collective representations as appropriate to contemporary society.