Relevance as Social Matrix of Attention in Alfred Schutz

Attention is a critical faculty in contemporary Western societies. What is surprising is the fact that attention has been mainly analyzed as an individual phenomenon. Scientific research that treats attention exclusively on the individual level simplifies an enormously complex situation. Instead, according to the idea defended in this essay, one cannot think of attention and perception without regard for cultural conventions and social norms. This article therefore proposes to investigate attention precisely in its social dimension. In particular, the specific objective is to highlight the contribution Alfred Schutz’s theory of systems of relevance can give to the understanding of the social mechanisms that regulate attention. In order to demonstrate the viability of the Schutzian proposal, here are discussed some recent perspectives that explore the mechanisms of the social regulation of attention. The article will briefly revisit these contributions that explicitly investigate intersubjective and collective attention, and will focus especially on the proposals of Eviatar Zerubavel and Yves Citton. Then is analyzed the role of attention in the theoretical edifice of Schutz, to focus on the relationship between attention and systems of relevance

Early Home Therapies against Covid-19. An Italian Case of Politicisation of Science?

Since February 2020, strategies aimed at containing and managing the Covid-19 syndemic have been developed by the governments of European countries. Among these measures, the possibility of an early treatment of the disease has been considered of fundamental importance, both for curing the disease and governing the syndemic. Despite their potential, early therapies received a somehow unexpected treatment in Italy and the debate around them gave rise to a very evident conflict between proponents and opponents of those treatments, to the point that some of the former organised a properly political movement in order to promote the integration of early home therapies in the official health protocols. Not surprisingly, the issue of early therapies has been considered an exemplary case of politicisation of science. However, the assimilation of the early therapy controversy to the frame of politicisation of science cannot fully explain why these protocols were discarded by political and health authorities. Rather, the consideration of health protocols as socio-technical objects shifts the attention on the vast range of cultural, political and economic factors that contributed to the general resistance towards those treatments. Therefore, we aim to analyse the media coverage of the phenomenon, and investigate the protocols of home treatment of Covid-19, paying attention to the interaction of the factors that contributed to the exclusion of home therapies into national guidelines

Early Home Therapies against Covid-19. An Italian Case of Politicisation of Science?

Since February 2020, strategies aimed at containing and managing the Covid-19 syndemic have been developed by the governments of European countries. Among these measures, the possibility of an early treatment of the disease has been considered of fundamental importance, both for curing the disease and governing the syndemic. Despite their potential, early therapies received a somehow unexpected treatment in Italy and the debate around them gave rise to a very evident conflict between proponents and opponents of those treatments, to the point that some of the former organised a properly political movement in order to promote the integration of early home therapies in the official health protocols. Not surprisingly, the issue of early therapies has been considered an exemplary case of politicisation of science. However, the assimilation of the early therapy controversy to the frame of politicisation of science cannot fully explain why these protocols were discarded by political and health authorities. Rather, the consideration of health protocols as socio-technical objects shifts the attention on the vast range of cultural, political and economic factors that contributed to the general resistance towards those treatments. Therefore, we aim to analyse the media coverage of the phenomenon, and investigate the protocols of home treatment of Covid-19, paying attention to the interaction of the factors that contributed to the exclusion of home therapies into national guidelines

Adaptive mitigation of the Air-Time pressure in LoRa multi-gateway architectures

LoRa is a promising technology in the current Internet of Things market, which operates in un-licensed bands achieving long-range communications and with ultra power devices. In this work we capitalize on the idea introduced in [1], i.e. balance the Air-Time of the different modulation spreading factors (SF), and adapt it to operate in a typical metropolitan scenario comprising multiple gateways (GWs) interconnected to a same network server. Our proposed approach, named ADaptive Mitigation of the AIr-time pressure in lORa (AD MAIORA), relies on a suitable measure of the per-spreading-factor load at each GW - quantified by means of a so-called pressure table -, and on a relevant heuristic algorithm which attempts to balance such a per-SF-pressure. Especially in cases of very loaded scenarios, where a high number of nodes insist on the same GWs, the use of AD MAIORA shows significant performance gains, up to a factor of 5 improvements with respect to the legacy LoRaWAN's Adaptive Data Rate

La rappresentazione dell’universo “no-vax” nella sfera pubblica digitale: una riflessione sul caso del vaccino anti COVID

Il dibattito sui vaccini in Italia è un caso di studio interessante per comprendere alcune dinamiche di funzionamento della sfera pubblica contemporanea. In apparenza, esso vede contrapporsi due schieramenti che esprimono posizioni totalmente inconciliabili e pare dunque rappresentare un ulteriore momento di messa in discussione del modello razionale di sfera pubblica nel contesto delle democrazie occidentali. L’obiettivo del nostro contributo è duplice: da un lato, vogliamo mettere in evidenza i limiti di una tale rappresentazione del fenomeno e, dall’altro, comprendere i meccanismi attraverso i quali essa è stata costruita nell’informazione online. Nella prima parte del contributo riprendiamo il dibattito sul concetto di sfera pubblica, con l’obiettivo di individuare un modello il più possibile adeguato alla sua interpretazione nella società contemporanea, dove la discussione si configura spesso nei termini di una contrapposizione tra posizioni stereotipate. La seconda sezione è deputata a descrivere alcuni dei meccanismi tipici della comunicazione online che tendono a esasperare tale tendenza. Nell’ultimo paragrafo illustriamo i risultati della ricerca empirica da noi condotta, avente lo scopo di ricostruire la resa mediatica delle posizioni dell’universo antivaccinista nei confronti del vaccino anti COVID-19. Dall’analisi dei 55 articoli apparsi su testate online, nel periodo compreso tra il primo gennaio 2020 e l’8 novembre 2020, abbiamo individuato quattro diverse categorie di articoli. Benché differenti nei contenuti e nelle forme di ricostruzione dell’universo “no-vax”, ognuna di esse ha fornito una rappresentazione caricaturale e artificiosa del movimento antivaccinista: a esso è stato attribuito un ampio ventaglio di posizioni spesso estremizzate e a volte in contraddizione tra loro, nonostante i suoi rappresentanti non si fossero espressi sul tema. Tale dibattito, dunque, non è apparso strutturato soltanto sulla base dei meccanismi già discussi in letteratura ma, almeno in alcuni casi, è emerso come le posizioni “estreme” delle parti in causa vengano costruite anche in assenza di esplicite dichiarazioni

Early Home Therapies against Covid-19. An Italian Case of Politicisation of Science?

Since February 2020, strategies aimed at containing and managing the Covid-19 syndemic have been developed by the governments of European countries. Among these measures, the possibility of an early treatment of the disease has been considered of fundamental importance, both for curing the disease and governing the syndemic. Despite their potential, early therapies received a somehow unexpected treatment in Italy and the debate around them gave rise to a very evident conflict between proponents and opponents of those treatments, to the point that some of the former organised a properly political movement in order to promote the integration of early home therapies in the official health protocols. Not surprisingly, the issue of early therapies has been considered an exemplary case of politicisation of science. However, the assimilation of the early therapy controversy to the frame of politicisation of science cannot fully explain why these protocols were discarded by political and health authorities. Rather, the consideration of health protocols as socio-technical objects shifts the attention on the vast range of cultural, political and economic factors that contributed to the general resistance towards those treatments. Therefore, we aim to analyse the media coverage of the phenomenon, and investigate the protocols of home treatment of Covid-19, paying attention to the interaction of the factors that contributed to the exclusion of home therapies into national guidelines