Media theory and web-based groups as social systems

This chapter consists of four sections. The first section analyses the relationship between consciousness and social systems, discussing how individual thoughts and communication are connected, influencing each other without being able to control each other. The second section develops an interdisciplinary approach which refers to phenomenological philosophy, theory of forms, second order cybernetics and the theory of autopoietic systems, describing a socio-evolutionary process where new media alter the societal capacity to handle complexity in time and space. In sections 3 and 4, the article takes a micro-level perspective by applying the theoretical framework build in sections 1 and 2 to concrete social formations (groups in social networks), observed as self-organizing interactive systems. In particular, the article takes on web-based groups in the social networks, observing them as: 1) bounded interaction systems, as forms in the medium of the social networks, organized as tight couplings of elements, users' profiles, that are loosely coupled in the medium, 2) social systems that produce themselves as the output of their own operations, creating a border of meaning by condensing a distinction between actual communication and possible communication. In this way, it will be possible to analyse how these web-based but nevertheless concrete social formations make a border of meaning, how they reproduce it, and what possibilities it has for the communication in the groups. This, at the same time, will count as an example of the situation of the individual in the modern society, where there is always a border of meaning when we want to belong to the social that determines what we can observe, and say

An improbable leadership: structural limits of educational communication. The case of some Italian primary schools

This paper discusses the results of field research focused on educational communication in the classroom. The research involved 11 primary schools in Italy. Nearly 100 hours of videotaped educational interactions were produced. The empirical analysis of the communication processes allowed us to analyse the main structures of educational communication. Mainstream researches on education analyse this subject in terms of the relationship between an educator and his or her pupils. Educators’ behaviour and practices are discussed and produce normative insights on the way an educator should perform to transmit knowledge, basic values and social norms. We are concerned about the meaning of ‘relationship’, that most works on education seem to be taken for granted as a trivial communicative input–output process where, upon a definite educator’s input and through a specific function, pupils discharge some definite output. But educational communication cannot control its consequences; as its meanings are constructed by pupils, its outcomes are unpredictable. The data highlight the relevance of preparing educators for the complexity of the interconnections between educational relationships and communication; it would implicate the empowerment of education’s reflexivity potential, giving to educators opportunities to recognize and exploit the potentialities of the situations that may emerge in educational settings

Interpretation as a form of mediation for the bilingual dialogue between foreign citizens and institutions. A qualitative study of interpreted-mediated doctor-patient communication in Italian hospitals

Objectives: Sociolinguistic studies on dialogue interpretation suggest that the interpreters in healthcare settings play a double role: they interpret and coordinate communication. Starting from the observation of actual and naturally-occurring interactions in intercultural healthcare services, the article suggests how an analysis of intercultural mediation may provide an empirical-based route to create guidelines for effective mediation practices. Methods: Our data is based on a corpus of 55 multilingual medical interaction in Arabic and Italian in public healthcare services in Italy. The corpus is analyzed drawing upon Conversation Analysis, studies on Dialogue Interpreting and studies on intercultural communication. Results: This article connects the forms of intercultural communication promoted by the mediators and the linguistic aspects of mediation, discussing how the relevance of the migrant patients' voices in medical encounters is connected with the use of specific conversational resources by the mediators. Conclusions: It will be shown: 1) how interpreters cut out migrant patients' voices of the interaction with the doctor by producing partial translations which focus on problems and treatments in medical terms; 2) how interpreters make migrant patients' voices relevant in the interaction. Practice implications: A conversational resource, affective formulations, is effective in capitalizing potential emphatic opportunities offered by the patient

Cultures of education in action: research on the relationship between interaction and cultural presuppositions regarding education in an international educational setting

Children’s International Summer Villages (CISV) is an international organization that offers opportunities for children to learn that, despite national or cultural differences, they are members of the human community in an interdependent world. The most important CISV program of activities is the ‘‘Village’’, which is a four-week meeting including between 9 and 11 national delegations of 1-year-old children. Since 1951, several villages have been organized on five continents and have involved thousands of hildren. CISV villages place particular emphasis on children’s self-realization, promoting children’s sense of responsibility and their skills in planning and managing social contexts. In this article, we analyze adult–child interactions recorded at eight CISV villages in Italy during the summers of 2006 and 2007. A total of 412 h of adult–children interaction were recorded in the context of a research evaluating the concrete application of pedagogical concepts such as the promotion of active participation among children and the consideration of children’s creativity. We analyze the organization of interactive sequences, adjacency pairs and projections of actions and reactions. Our analysis shows that, despite the emphasis on children’s autonomy, specific interactional devices are used by the adults to maintain control over the trajectory and the ‘‘agenda’’ of the interactions

Citizenship as practice: critical evaluation of educational communication as means of young migrants’ social participation

In the years 2004-2006 the Education Office and the Social Polices and Integration Office at the City Council of Modena designed three projects addressed to sustain social participation of Children of International Migrants (CIM) empowering their active citizenship. The premise of these interventions was that social integration depends on social participation. Social participation describes social actions that are both autonomous and visible in society. This projects looked at citizenship not as a sort of cognitive status to be reached but as the outcome of the experience of everyday participation to social processes. The activities proposed to CIM wanted to stimulate a reflection about everyday experience of participation to host social processes, with the help of adult social operators. Our research highlights that once they materialised in concrete interactions all of these three projects produced paradoxical results: it was possible to observe that social operators systematically violated CIM spaces of communication, that is to say CIM opportunities to experience, in the context of the social interventions, an active and autonomous social participation. Social operators interfered with CIM autonomous participation to interactions as soon as it brought about meanings inconsistent with the ideological and theoretical premises of the interventions; this brought CIM to mistrust their opportunity of an autonomous social participation. A social intervention aiming to offer an opportunity to experience social participation needs a communication form specialised in promoting self-expression of communicators, a communication form that creates mutual trust, that is able explore common ground and continuity of views between interlocutors. We offer a sketch of a communication form that promises to be much more effective than education in sustaining social integration of young migrants by mean of the promotion of their autonomous participation. This communication form is called “dialogue”. The limits of educational communication suggest that for social workers that operates among adolescents and young adults, dialogue is an opportunity to experiment, to make their work more effective and the projects in which they are involved more efficient

Intercultural and interlinguistical mediation in the healthcare system: the challenge of conflict management

Nowadays, young women and their children are the most important migrant users of healthcare services. In particular, these people may encounter different cultural constructions of health, disease, therapy, motherhood. The observed difficulties in intercultural communication encourage healthcare systems to promote mediation. Mediation consists in the intervention of a third person, who promotes reciprocal understanding and acceptance between participants.The research we are presenting focuses on intercultural communication which is produced in these services between healthcare personnel and migrant patients. To achieve this goal our research aims at integrating different theoretical and methodological approaches: conversation analysis, in order to observe the interaction between healthcare personnel, pointing out the cues of the participants' turn-taking sequences; analysis of the cultural presuppositions of the healthcare system as a communication system with a specific function in society, by highlighting contextualization cues, that is, cultural presuppositions that steer interaction system, which result from the wider social context, and which are cues of the cultural identities that characterize it. I observed that in most cases the patients have very few opportunities to answer to the physicians’ questions or to pose questions or doubts. Substituting the patients as main participants in interactions, the mediator never refuses the physicians’ indications, never expresses doubts, never asks to the patients if they have some reason to doubt or refuse. In these cases interlinguistic and intercultural mediation de-emphasises the importance of the larger social context, of the durability of relationships between the parties, of their political recognition

Analysing trust building in educational activities

This article aims to offer both a theoretical contribution and examples of practices of trust building in peace education; the article presents an empirical analysis of videotaped interactions in the context of peace education activities in international groups of adolescents. The analysis aims to understand if and in which ways peace education is effective in enabling adolescents to communicate, creating conditions of working trust, mutual humanization, mutual recognition of needs, and trustworthiness of facilitators. In analysing interactions, we will follow the basic methodology of Conversation Analysis, which consists in working on naturally occurring interactions and more specifically on the contribution of single turns or actions to the ongoing sequence, with reference to the context. The analysis concerns the design of turns (actions) produced in the interaction, the organization of the sequences in which educators’ and adolescents’ turns are intertwined, the cultural presuppositions of turn design and sequence organisation. Education is a system where trusting commitment in specific interactions is vital for its reproduction; in education, creating effective conditions for trusting commitment means promoting possibility for social action and relationships, thus avoiding marginalization, alienation and loss of confidence in the educational relationship. Our analysis highlights some ways in which educators’ actions create the conditions of adolescents’ trusting commitment in group activities; our study enhances a reflection on the relationship between trust building and avoidance of the unintended consequences of education related to lack of trust

Trust building in the promotion of peace and intercultural dialogue among adolescents in international summer camps

This article aims to offer both a theoretical contribution and examples of practices of trust building in peace education. The analysis regards international summer camps established in Italy. Each camp is attended by four delegations of ten adolescents coming from different countries; aiming to promote adolescents’ ability in conflict resolution, peaceful relationships and intercultural dialogue. In analysing interactions, we follow the basic methodology of Conversation Analysis, which consists in working on naturally occurring interactions and more specifically on the contribution of single turns or actions to the ongoing sequence, with reference to the context. The analysis concerns the design of turns (actions) produced in the interaction and the organization of the sequences in which educators’ and adolescents’ turns are intertwined. We aim to understand if and in which ways education is effective in enabling adolescents to communicate, creating conditions of trust and trusting commitment, mutual humanization, and mutual recognition of needs. Our data exemplifies two different ways of promoting trust and communication: 1) the educator coordinates the direct interactions between adolescents, who cooperate in constructing a joint narrative; 2) the educator acts as a mediator of contacts among adolescents, promoting their alternate participation in the interaction in triadic exchanges

Affectivity, expertise, and inequality: three foundations of trust in education. Reflections on presuppositions, (unintended) consequences, and possible alternatives

Niklas Luhmann (1988) draws a basic distinction between two notions which both emerge in the context of familiarity: confidence and trust. Both confidence and trust refer to expectations which may be disappointed, but while confidence does not involve disappointment as an expectation, trust presupposes an attribution of risk about the possibility of disappointment. According to Luhmann, in the modern functionally differentiated society, individuals must be confident in the most important social subsystems because there are expectations towards these systems (e.g. economics, politics, the laws, science, families, education etc.) which cannot be avoided. Trust concerns only those specific subsystems’ activities which participants can retreat from, while the subsystems themselves cannot stop working. However, lack of trust in internal activities can affect confidence inside these social systems: it is possible to observe that, while individuals participating in their internal processes cannot retreat from them, they can lose confidence in their effectiveness, and this can reduce their effectiveness in society. Disappointment is produced in these systems at the expense of confidence. In the education system, students must be confident in the education system and they cannot avoid participating in its internal processes. However, they may lack trust in specific educational activities, above all those involving educators and classmates. This lack of trust can create lack of confidence in the education system, in particular children’s marginalization and self-marginalization in educational communication, with a consequent reduction of effectiveness of education in society. The avoidance of taking trust risks (Luhmann 1988) activates a vicious circle: it implies loosing possibilities of students’ action in the system, reducing their preparation to risk trust, and activating anxiety and suspect for interlocutors’ actions. Consequently, in the education system it is particularly important to encourage the risk of trust in order to avoid risks for confidence. Trust must be assured through strategies which reduce the risk of not risking trust. According to Anthony Giddens (1990), trust can be enhanced in two ways in modern society: (1) trough expertise and technological systems, (2) through interpersonal affective relationships. In the education system, expertise is generally considered the main source of trust as adults are hold to be the experts (teachers, educators), those who must be trusted for their knowledge and competence. However, since the end of the Forties, psychologists like Carl Rogers (1951) have suggested that expertise is not the sole means to activate trust. In this perspective, teachers themselves should not simply be confident in their own expertise. Rather they should trust interpersonal affective relationships with students, listening to their personal expressions and supporting them empathically. Our contribution addresses the issue of trust in educational system and particularly the following questions: which is the role of experts in creating trust among students? Can the system create trust beyond through interpersonal closeness, beyond trust in technical expertise? These questions are addressed through an empirical analysis of videotaped educational interactions. The analysis focuses on the controversial importance of expertise and interpersonal closeness in building trust in education. Our aim is to examine, identify and highlight the design of educators’ actions that can support different forms of students’ trusting commitment. The analysis of the interactions, which is shown here, is particularly useful in highlighting those types of empirical actions which can promote trust in communication processes between educators and students and among students

Between marginalisation and agency. Primary school teachers’ narratives in London and the position of children with migrant backgrounds

Based on qualitative interviews with primary school teachers in Greater London, this article explores teachers’ narratives to uncover how children with migrant backgrounds (CMB) are positioned in the contexts of their learning experience. In particular, the article utilises the analytical category of trust to argue that the position of CMB in teachers’ narratives is related to the form of teachers’ trust. When trust is based on categorical inequalities, CMB are often considered untrustworthy partners construction of the learning and teaching experience. Trust based on categorical inequalities becomes a form of trust in distrust and CMB are positioned in the children’s needs paradigm where decision-making is reserved to teachers who act for them and on their behalf. When trust is based on personal relationships, CMB are positioned as agents who are capable to voice their interests, bringing about consequential changes in the contexts of their experiences. CMB are positioned in the children’s interests paradigm, where agency is expected and promoted as a right of children who are socially constructed as agents who can make a difference with their choices