ICTs and The Human Body. A Social Representation Approach

none2Aim of the research was to monitor how new technologies - mainly the mobile and the internet - and the human body (as well as the Self) are considered, within a social representations approach. Nearly three hundred university students from different disciplinary fields answered a questionnaire aimed to detect the content (through free associations), the attitudes (through a semantic differential scale) and the structure (through correspondence analysis based on the free associations) of the representations. Results show that everyday thinking seems not to have integrated, at a conceptual level, the ongoing process of convergence between the human body and technologies. Along the detected dimensions, different groups take different positions, mainly as regards allocations, practices, and concerns with the human body.noneCONTARELLO A.; FORTUNATI, L.Contarello, Alberta; Fortunati, L

Peace, war and conflict: Social representations shared by peace activists and non-activists

The article suggests the use of social representations theory to provide a positive approach to peace research and a theoretical framework for understanding peace movements. Studying peace, war and conflict in this perspective enables exploration of these concepts as objects socially constructed, elaborated and shared by different groups. Four groups of activists are compared with people not belonging to any association, in order to investigate the existence of particular social representations of peace, war and conflict. As in previous cross-cultural research, an independent social representation of peace emerges only among activists. The social representation of war is also different in the two groups: nonactivists see it as frightening, whereas activists see ways of tackling it. The greatest difference between the two groups is in the social representation of conflict. Conflict is assimilated to war for non-activists, whereas activists represent it as more manageable and normal. The results support the idea of understanding peace activism as a particular form of coping - community coping - based on the group as a whole, rather than on individual capacity to manage problems. At a theoretical level, the article discusses the importance of linking social representations to practice and group identification. At a practical level, it suggests that support for pacifism will be only transient and superficial until these underlying differences in representations can be changed

Internet-Mobile convergence: Via similarity or complementarity?

none2Titolo corretto:Trends in Communication ISSN corretto 1383-8857noneFORTUNATI L.; CONTARELLO A.Fortunati, L.; Contarello, Albert

Resisting ageism through lifelong learning mature students' counter-narratives to the construction of aging as decline

This study aims to investigate the narratives of some “mature” students who are challenging the widely-shared view that studying, and learning new things, is a prerogative of young people. Twenty-five narrative interviews were conducted with older people enrolled at the University of Padua, Italy, to shed light on the motives, values, self-image, and personal solutions that supported their decision to resume and successfully pursue a path of studies at a “non-canonical” age. Starting from perspectives that emphasize the social dimension of meaning-making activity, we explore the counter-narratives functional to the deconstruction of “age prejudice”. The results that emerge from a thematic and structural narrative analysis show some common themes and three different counter-narratives through which respondents try to challenge the idea that they are too old to study. The paper ends with some considerations on the degree of efficacy with which these counter-narratives can resist age prejudice, identifying cases in which they favor change on a personal, social, or cultural level