Luca Serafini

University of Naples Federico II | UNINA · Department of Political Sciences

Increased dependence of the news media system on online platforms has caused a readjustment of the traditional business models that supported media enterprises until a few years ago, which in some cases has resulted in a redefinition of the boundaries of the journalistic field. To test the interplay between different strategies of relationship with...

In recent years, reflection on institutions has assumed great prominence in Italian Theory. Roberto Esposito especially, in his three most recent books, has provided a genealogy of institutions, aimed at challenging the prevailing way in which they have been thematized in Western thought. As he sees it, a repressive conception of institutions has d...

Post-truth theories inscribe the credibility gained in the public sphere by forms of knowledge refused by science within the framework of an epistemic crisis involving the value of truth for which irrational, populist, and conspiracy groups are to be blamed. In this contribution, we test the presence of widespread argumentative repertoires in suppo...

This chapter provides an understanding of the social configurations with which Refused Knowledge Communities (RKCs) attribute credibility to knowledge about healthcare and wellbeing. This study focuses on how RKCs enrol knowledge claims and heterogeneous actors to build, maintain and legitimise forms of knowledge refused by science. The analysis re...

COVID-19 pandemic has once again raised the long-standing problem of trust in science and scientists. However, many approaches tend, on one hand, to analyze science as if it were an entirely autonomous entity – and thus to attribute the causes of the decline in trust to factors external to it; on the other hand, these approaches address the questio...

In journalism studies, the advent of the World Wide Web and the rise of online journalism are generally associated with going beyond the objective, normative paradigm associated with the principles of philosophical and scientific modernity towards a postmodern paradigm centred on subjectivity and relativism. This article offers an alternative readi...

The wave of disinformation that marked recent years led to the emergence of new conceptual categories, such as 'post-truth'. However, it also generated forms of reaction to the phenomenon, such as fact-checking, a journalistic genre that has recently established itself worldwide. The first theoretical hypothesis of this paper postulates that the su...

This work explores how the narrative on immigration changes when society is threatened by “real” risks, i.e., during the COVID-19 health crisis. We compared the frequency and engagement of over 348,684 posts published on Facebook between December 2019 and November 2020 by Italian politicians and news media. We identified two waves of “tangible cris...

The aim of this work is to redefine the concept of ‘parajournalism’ in relation to the transformations that characterise contemporary information — in particular those generated by the progressive shift of information itself on social media. We will analyse the main meanings attributed to the term ‘parajournalism’, emphasising how this term general...

In this paper, we explore how the narrative on immigration changes when society is threatened by ‘real’ risks, i.e., during the COVID-19 health crisis. We compared the salience and engagement of posts published on Facebook between December 2019 and November 2020 by politicians and by the Italian news media; post selection used a dictionary related...

This paper aims at demonstrating how, starting from the aesthetic and playful modalities of social relationship fostered by the Internet, it is possible to overturn the dominant relational patterns imposed by the algorithms of the main players of the digital world like Facebook and Google. If the latter promote the formation of tribal, like-minded...

L’articolo analizza le narrazioni dei giornali italiani sul Covid-19, concentrandosi sulla rielaborazione e la semplificazione mediatica dei messaggi provenienti dalle istituzioni e dalla comunità scientifica. Prendendo in esame in particolare i titoli dei giornali in tema Covid, si distingue tra contenuti illecitamente semplificati, che alimentano...

In journalism studies, the development of the web and the beginning of online journalism are generally interpreted as getting past a normative, objective paradigm, which led to the beginning of philosophical and scien- tific modernity. Instead, they are linked to the arrival of a postmodern pa- radigm focused on subjectivity and relativism. This pa...

This article investigates a trend toward integration between print and digital forms of information that is detectable in specific segments of the Italian news industry. This tendency might be connected to the news groups’ acknowledgement of the limits of a digital-only approach. This results in strategies of integration and differentiation of digi...

The spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has enormously increased the media exposure of scientists, some of whom have become well-known and even popular. However, it may also have signaled the beginning of an unexpected decline in public trust towards them. Responsibility for this can be ascribed not only to distortions in the communication of scientific...

The structural connection between gamification processes and the dissemination of information in online environments created by the affordances of digital media has led to the rise of newsgames in journalism. These are computerized games intended to illustrate a specific, concrete news item to a participatory, interactive audience. This development...

Platform capitalism brings several processes to completion that were already apparent during post-industrial capitalism. One of these involves images and their gradual loss of a symbolic dimension. The mechanisms that platforms employ to direct the production of media content reduce images to objects of immediate use and consumption. Consequently,...

In this paper I use concepts of Georg Simmel’s social aesthetics to investigate and describe several relational and communicative dynamics that occur in the digital public sphere—where the aesthetic dimension has now assumed great importance. Specifically, Simmel’s work proves to be more suited than Habermas’s for understanding the mechanisms of “t...

Gamification, understood as the use of ludic mechanisms in non-ludic contexts, is seen today as a practice ingrained in new technologies, especially in new media. The shift of journalism onto social networks has laid the foundations for a ludic communicative paradigm that revolves specifically around gaming mechanisms. Nevertheless, recent developm...

The purpose of this paper is to show how the interaction between Kantian ethics and some aspects of Heideggerian philosophy can lead to the model of a subject in immediate relationship with others and with his or her community. The positions of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida on this question are presented in contrast with those of Alain Renaut...

In this review of Persons and Things, recently translated into English and published by Polity Press, we discuss how this text investigates some of the most important themes of Roberto Esposito’s thought. Specifically, the book continues the process of constructing an idea of community intended as lack, gift and impropriety that the Italian philoso...

The aim of this work is to examine a few aspects of Jacques Derrida's reading of the philos-ophy of Heidegger and Levinas. Specifically, we intend to show that the criticism Derrida directs towards certain themes in Levinas's thought at the same time contains a revaluation of Heidegger's ontology as it was developed during the 1920s, before the so-...

The purpose of this conversation is to analyse the bond between Cultural Studies and social research, and define analogies and differences between Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology. Scott Lash, a cultural theorist strongly influenced by philosophical thought, clarifies how the latter can rightfully be part of a social research oriented toward...