The recipe: the queen of pragmatics; an Italian case study

The purpose of this study is to investigate the communicative status and the daily practices of use of the recipe in the broader context of cooking and eating inside the home. My thesis is that the recipe should be regarded as the queen of pragmatics of communication, as recipes are to be found in homes all over the world. I draw on two different research projects: the first study reports upon semi-structured interviews with 137 respondents living in the North East of Italy. The second study presents and discusses the most important categories of meaning that emerged from a content analysis of 398 messages posted on the online cooking forum of the site of Donna Moderna [Modern Woman], the most widely read women’s weekly magazine in Italy

Law and the Reproduction Sphere as the Place of a Double Production of Value

In the general framework of the relationship between women and the law, a large debate is growing on the misconceived value of domestic labour.  Within this debate, I argue that the recent transformations that have affected this sphere have further complicated the contradictory situation in which domestic labour finds itself in and which legal studies need to contend with.  I will show that the domestic sphere has now become a place where there is a double production of value. I argue that this happened because the production of value connected to the production and reproduction of the labour-force after the feminist struggles of the 70s and 80s had gone into crisis. The crisis originated as women contested and refused to enable such production through the material and immaterial dimensions of their domestic labour, leading to its decrease. The machinisation of the domestic sphere starting in the 90s has therefore been capital´'s response to this confrontation, the strategy it has employed to extract value from this sphere anew. As consequence, today there are two layers of value production in the reproduction sphere: the first working badly and the second functioning better for capital. The complex situation, which is described shortly here, is what legal culture has to deal with, nowadays

Mobile phone use reflects the development of new social stratifications across European countries

One of the key technological developments in the past two decades has been the spread in the use of mobile phones. How do such changes in technology affect issues such as social justice and inequality? Sakari Taipale and Leopoldina Fortunati write that while the creation of new mobile phone technologies has tended to be seen as a uniquely positive development, closer analysis of mobile phone usage reveals that many of the new features of modern smart phones remain unused by a majority of users. Moreover there is a clear split in terms of social groups who have embraced the new technologies, and those who remain wedded to older features, suggesting that more needs to be done to ensure all European citizens are in a position to take full advantage of new technology

Journalism Without Journalists

Draft book chapter.No abstrac

Framing the Psycho-Social and Cultural Aspects of Human-Machine Communication

In this introduction to the fourth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the nine articles selected for inclusion. In this essay, we aim to frame some crucial psychological, sociological, and cultural aspects of this field of research. In particular, we situate the current scholarship from a historical perspective by (a) discussing humanity’s long walk with hybridity and otherness, at both the cultural and individual development levels, (b) considering how the organization of capital, labor, and gender relations serve as fundamental context for understanding HMC in the present day, and (c) contextualizing the development of the HMC field in light of seismic, contemporary shifts in society and the social sciences. We call on the community of researchers, students, and practitioners to ask the big questions, to ground research and theory in the past as well as the real and unfolding lifeworld of human-machine communication (including what HMC may become), and to claim a seat at the table during the earliest phases in design, testing, implementation, law and policy, and ethics to intervene for social good

El teléfono celular entre la oralidad y la escritura

En este artículo se analiza el uso de los teléfonos celulares y, en particular, las diferentes estrategias y lógicas de uso vinculadas a la oralidad y la escritura, de las llamadas y los mensajes de texto intercambiados entre adolescentes italianos. El análisis surge de una investigación cualitativa, basada en treinta entrevistas no estructuradas realizadas a una muestra de adolescentes, quince varones y quince mujeres. Estas entrevistas se realizaron en Italia en 2000, año en el que la mensajería de texto despegó dentro de la comunicación móvil. Dicha explosión en Italia, al igual que en otros países, involucró especialmente a los adolescentes.Original: Fortunati, L. (2001). The mobile phone between orality and writing. Artículo presentado en E-usages, tercera edición de ICUST (International Conference on Uses and Services in Telecommunications) , 12-14 junio, Selección y traducción realizada por Soledad Caballero con expresa autorización de la autora

Opening Space for Theoretical, Methodological, and Empirical Issues in Human-Machine Communication

This journal offers a space dedicated to theorizing, researching empirically, and discussing human-machine communication (HMC), a new form of communication with digital interlocutors that has recently developed and has imposed the urgency to be analyzed and understood. There is the need to properly address the model of this specific communication as well as the roles, objectives, functions, experiences, practices, and identities of the interlocutors involved, both human and digital. Reading these seven articles is an advantageous intellectual exercise for entering this new field of research on Human-Machine Communication. The present volume contributes substantially both at theoretical and empirical levels by outlining this new field of research, giving new perspectives and models, and inspiring new paths of research

Moving Ahead With Human-Machine Communication

In this essay, we introduce the 10 articles comprising Volume 2 (2021) of Human-Machine Communication, each of which is innovative and offers a substantial contribution to the field of human-machine communication (HMC). As a collection, these articles move forward the HMC project by touching on four layers of important discourse: (1) updates to theoretical frameworks and paradigms, including Computers as Social Actors (CASA), (2) examination of ontology and prototyping processes, (3) critical analysis of gender and ability/disability relations, and (4) extension of HMC scholarship into organizational contexts. Building upon the insights offered by the contributing authors and incorporating perspectives coming from the historical, sociological, and semiotic (and hermeneutic) disciplines, we discuss challenges of applying CASA in HMC to suggest reframing in light of long-standing human experiences with automata, objective culture, narration (fiction), and symbols. Whereas CASA’s “old brains engage new media” formulation leads naturally to a focus on mindless versus mindful attribution processes, these hermeneutic and semiotic interpretations of robots/media as narrative texts and symbolic humans beg scholarly attention to issues of literacy and representation, respectively. Finally, we advance a series of justifications/calls for future research avenues

Gender and Human-Machine Communication: Where Are We?

In this introduction to the fifth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the five articles focusing on gender and human-machine communication. In this essay, we will analyze the theme of gender, including how this notion has historically and politically been set up, and for what reasons. We will start by considering gender in in-person communication, then we will progress to consider what happens to gender when it is mediated by the most important ICTs that preceded HMC: the telephone, mobile phone, and computer-mediated communication (CMC). We outline the historical framework necessary to analyze the last section of the essay, which focuses on gender in HMC. In the conclusion, we will set up some final sociological and political reflections on the social meaning of these technologies for gender and specifically for women