The contemporary media environment is characterized by a high degree of complexity. Users move across different media outlets and digital platforms, and media consumption practices are entangled with other everyday practices. However, this does not imply that everyone uses every existing media outlet or digital platform. Different elements may play a role in media choice and attention location. Relying on the media repertoires approach, and through factor analysis and cluster analysis (based on the cross-country and cross-regional survey PIN – “The Peoples’ Internet”) the aim of this article is to identify different clusters of users characterized by specific patterns and combinations of legacy media and digital platforms. Special attention will be given at the placement of social media in media repertoires as they have a profound impact on mediated societal processes such as political debate, everyday communication, and impact on the whole media ecology. The article will describe which clusters of Italian users can be identified based on their digital and legacy media use; which socio-demographic variables characterize the clusters and how the uses of social media differ within these clusters.

This article uses the example of high-end raiding in the online game World of Warcraft to investigate the power relationships between players and producers and to examine how the notion of struggle can inform an understanding of co-creative game design. The study is based on a recently published dissertation work and complemented by an interview with two expert interviewees. The results of the study show that while game designers still have a de-facto power position in that they can ban guilds, however, producers are not seen as legitimate when exercising this power. Instead raiding guilds are reluctantly refereeing their game themselves and treat the game company at times even as an inconvenience to be played around. This participatory power is not given to raiders but it is the outcome of a struggle with the producers of the game. Raiders also explicitly criticize the exploitation of their labor in game testing.

Non basta dire partecipazione. Le condizioni di possibilita delle pratiche partecipative mediate

Creativity, connection and participation. These are some of the coordinates along which many practices and interpretations that accompany the development and diffusion of web 2.0 move. The same way a karst river alternately emerges and sinks, the theme of emancipation returns over and over again, together with the promise of democratic evolution of a culture and society which would lever on the new potentials of expression that media digital technology makes available to whomsoever has the wish and interest to use them. This article proposes the use of the concept of visibility to interpret the connection, participation and creativity dynamics of 2.0 web and their promises of emancipation. It allows the circumscription of the intrinsic political dimension of contemporary communication environments, intended both as a dependency on power structures and as a space for truth and democratic re-growth. Beginning with a series of theoretical frames from Hannah Arendt and Foucault to some contributions of today’s online activism, the article tries to loosen the tangle of links and potentialities related to visibility which is made possible by social media. It also shows how, in self-narration powered by new cultural industries, are implied both the risk of rationalization and the possibility of regeneration thanks to the increase of inter-subjectivity and narrative dialogue.