Cosimo Marco Scarcelli

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Padua

The relationship between digital practices, gender, and intimacy in teenagers’ everyday life is gaining growing attention. We can look at digital media as environments that offer young people agency and spaces where they can construct and perform their identity (boyd 2014) through bricolage practices (Willett 2008) and by experimenting with their o...

The multifaced nature of online dating practices and experiences highlights both its empowering potential and the challenges it poses, including stigma and violence, particularly within the contexts of queer and LGBT+ communities and the subjectivities they contain. This paper aims to explore perceptions and responses to risks and fears in online d...

Recently, we have seen relatively unknown platforms, like OnlyFans, rise to popularity among producers and consumers of sexual(ised) digital content. This seems to be especially so in the case of young adults who were affected by a sudden disappearance of entry-level jobs in hospitality, retail and associated functions, or diminished university exp...

Sin dagli esordi gli studi sui media digitali hanno posto l’attenzione sulle questioni legate al genere e alla sessualità mostrando come chat, social network, blog e siti internet potessero rappresentare spazi di sperimentazione identitaria, strumenti di condivisione e pratiche di attivismo sociale e politico, ma anche amplificatori di forme di vio...

Media are a key site for the construction, negotiation and opposition of gender, sexual identities and performances at a social and cultural level. This chapter focuses on diverse expressions of sexuality in media reception, production and representation. It explores, on the one hand, aspects of the changing social and sexual landscape; and on the...

In today’s public debate about the young people–smartphone relationship, one of the most recurring ideas is that of addiction. In the ‘excessive use’ of communication technology rhetoric, the so-called detox centres, sprung up in recent years in South Korea and China, are often cited as examples, generally guided by psychiatrists and psychologists....

The chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological framework of the book and of the related research on the relationship between young people and smartphone practices. First, we outline some of the most important works pertaining to the social implications of the smartphone. We underline how research in the socio-anthropological field has be...

This chapter analyses the role of smartphones in people’s emotional and relationship dynamics. Several central dimensions will be explored, referring to the relationship between mobile technologies and intimacy, especially focusing on practices like flirting via social network platforms, using online dating apps and sexting. The analysis outlines t...

Il lavoro è il risultato di una ricerca che ha coinvolto circa 900 studenti delle scuole secondarie, ai quali è stato chiesto di creare un personaggio che pensavano potesse diventare popolare sui social media. Gli autori analizzano il modo in cui i racconti dei partecipanti si intersecano con i discorsi dominanti sul genere e sulla sessualità e co...

L'intersezione di omosessualità e prostituzione, ha prodotto un particolare tipo di attore sociale che si trova a convertire le sue risorse sessuali in pecuniarie, dando vita così a nuove forme di maschilità come quella del sexworker. Lo scopo di questo intervento è quello di evidenziare, attraverso una revisione della letteratura in-ternazionale,...

OnlyFans has enjoyed increasing attention from media and from users and consumers, especially since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, and particularly amongst internet- savy emerging adults. We used semi-structured interviews to collect testimonies from young Italian women (N=20) who sell their own sexual(ised) content on OnlyFans and processed t...

From the Trump administration’s attempts to narrow down the definition of gender to biologically determined sex at birth to the everyday life gendered performances in digital platforms, from increasing representations of LGBTQI+ in TV programmes to the popularity of PornHub, the relations between gender, sexuality and media are ubiquitous and deepl...

Digital media play an important role in the process of identity construction, including sexual identity and its construction within a peer group. When it comes to teenagers, sexting discourses are impregnated with moral panics, rather than critical reasoning. As a result, adults are rarely interested in the significance of sexting in teenage lives....

The quantified self refers to the cultural phenomenon of using numbers to monitor and measure elements of everyday life in relation to their physical and emotional embodiment. It comprises a set of practices that are constantly increasing as a result of the diffusion of portable and wearable digital devices. Self‐tracking is not a novelty of contem...

Considering gender, sexuality and sexual desire are culturally and socially constructed through social learning and interaction and pornography as a cultural practice, this article focuses on how the discourse that young Italian heterosexual couples construct around pornography can illustrate their definition and negotiation of desire, and gender r...

If we look at the relationship between young people and adults in terms of their usage of digital technologies, we can see that the studies conducted to date have paid little attention to adult users. Thanks to interviews and autoethnographic diaries, the present study looks at how young people view their parents' use of digital media. A 'mediologi...

To conduct fruitful research into intimacy, young people and digital media, it is necessary to move beyond the reductive question of whether sex in media is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, avoiding a deterministic approach and focusing instead on media practices that are shaped by a drive to make sense of media and sexual cultures. We regard intimacy as a relatio...

In these last few years, the role of smartphones in the everyday lives of young people has become a widely-debated issue. This technological device has been 1 In compliance with Italian academic folkways, the authors acknowledge that Paolo Magaudda wrote paragraphs 1. Introduction; 2. The Smartphone and the re-composition of collective practices an...

Frequently the relation between young people and the technologies of communication is trivialized by describing adolescents as naturally predisposed to digital technology or as incautious users. Media education goes beyond this oversimplification in trying to help adolescents to improve their digital and media literacy. Many debates have taken plac...

with Daniel Cardoso (FCSH - UNL; ECATI - ULHT) - presenter Marco Scarcelli (Università di Padova) - discussant January 11th Against a pornographic ontology: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Sexualities Studies and Pornography (15:00-18:00) January 12th Gender and Sexuality in a Portuguese context: Southern Europe and late/unfinished modernity (10:...

Drawing upon the review of collected literature on publics and participation, this article aims at identifying and analytically mapping those dimensions of being an audience that have been considered as having a civic and political value. On the basis of a deep examination of the vast array of similarities and differences between all the collected...

Le riflessioni che sono al centro di questo volume ruotano attorno a due poli principali: il radicamento dei media nella quotidianità odierna e il protagonismo delle giovani generazioni, poste al centro di quel mutamento, simbolico e tecnologico, che produce ed è prodotto dalla cultura mediale contemporanea. I capitoli, redatti da giovani ricercato...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the output of an empirical research on digital skills in order to develop a typology of skills circulation among young digital users. Relying on research on digital literacy in media studies and on users in STS, in this article we start criticizing the concepts of " digital divide " , " digital inequalities " and...

Digital media are an important part of the lives of young people, who use these resources to access sexual materials such as pornography. This kind of consumption can reveal important aspects of their social lives. Starting from the viewpoint of consumers, this paper is a reflection on girls’ consumption of pornography and on the meanings they give...

The Internet is an important part of everyday life and many people also use it for activities connected to intimacy and sexuality. This essay describes the bricolage that adolescents collect every day from family, school, peer groups, and the Internet when searching for information connected to the sexual sphere. Nowadays a new socialization proces...