Connected publics and communities of practice

Digital languages ​​pervade the horizon of co-evolution between the media system and society, triggering a post-human socio-anthropological shift regarding the idea of ​​personhood and elaborating the meaning that governs relational and neo-tribal dynamics. This has called into question the consolidated relationships between production and consumption , the classical idea of ​​inhabiting one's own time, and the structures of the mass culture industry, which no longer produces exclusively for a homogenizing audience, but also contemplates a reappropriation of symbolic forms of representation by the latter.

Public and publics

The term "public" has taken on a different meaning in current digital contexts as it is no longer possible to speak and conceive of an audience that is directly subjected to the contents of communication, nor a mass that responds uncritically to it through consumption. Instead, we must speak of a series of audiences, the so-called "networked publics"The connected publics (Giovanni Boccia Artieri, 2012). This term refers to the new condition of digital connection between cultural practices, social relations and the development of media technologies (Mizuko Ito, 2008) and defines a new logic of media participation that includes all the classic types of communication, namely bottom-up, top-down , horizontal communication: in practice, according to Ito, the connected publics “they can react, remake, redistribute, participating in the sharing of culture and knowledge through the logic of discourse and exchange as well as through that of media reception alone".

Participatory cultures

Following this definable perspective of “become media” (G. Boccia Artieri, 2012), that is, the appropriation of media language and its playful use in changing and collective contexts, it is possible to conceive new cultural forms born from the logics of production-consumption and concretised in user-generated e distributed contents, that is, the participatory culturesAccording to Henry Jenkins (2008) they can be defined as those forms of aggregation that present:

– low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement;

– strong support for creating and sharing your own productions with others;

– informal mentorship whereby knowledge passes from experts to novices following the sole logic of competence;

– members who believe their contributions to the discussion are significant;

– members who perceive some degree of social connection with others by caring about what they think about their productions;

Community of practice

All the media productions, interactions, and affiliations that arise in this way subvert the classic canons of structuring and attributing a specific cultural identity . What gives substance and therefore realizes this type of convergence culture are, in fact, communities of practice . According to Etienne Wenger (1998), they are made up of people participating in a collective learning process within a shared domain of human activity: for example, a tribe learning to survive, a group of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of students defining their identity at school. In other words, they present themselves as groups of people who share an interest or passion for something they do or learn to do better while interacting regularly. There are three elements that characterize this type of community and allow them to serve as a cornerstone for the structuring of a more mature model:

1) the shared domain of interests;

2) the community dimension;

3) practice understood as a shared repertoire of resources such as experiences, stories, and ways of approaching recurring problems, created over time and through ongoing interaction.

Francesco D'Ambrosio