Lo spettacolo della violenza. Il ruolo della vetrina multimediale nella «promozione» del cyberbullismo

Abstract

The episodes of violence recently happened in some italian schools, propose again as urgent the problem of the relationship between young people and new technologies. In some occasions new media enlarged bullying’s facts, beginning against their will accomplices or witnesses of deviance’s facts. Moreover, also television has always represented violence in general and adolescent deviance too, by proposing it through news reporting and fiction programs, often in spectacular forms. Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective and Meyrowitz’s and Thompson’s observations about influence of media on social settings are useful to analyze the spread of back stage style.The possibility of filming by mobile aggressive behaviours of individuals or groups against schoolmates, or previews of violent facts appeared on blogs of some young people, are only some examples of how often a connection between media and violent crime risks to favour apocalyptic or ultra deterministic interpretations of communication facts, while obscuring creative and positive technologies dimension.Should we consider media responsible for deviant behaviours or should we, instead, reflect about changing of society, of rhythms and contents of socialization and about changes of young social condition?The difficulty in conceiving specific forms of safeguard for a wide universe without rules as the Web, stress one of the contradictions of new technologies, although representing their unquestioned potentiality. Through the possibility to test new ways of fruition, technologies construct and re-construct identities, producing, sometimes, problematic and fragmentary results. The Media education perspective, aiming to stimulate an aware use of media in the school but also in other formative contexts, might give some answers about the matter, clarifying the role of agents of socialization in contemporary society and the importance of languages and communicative practices of media in order to understand new generations.