Technologies in Education

Uploading memory: contrattare la storia sul sito di YouTube.

Il mio intervento avrà come nucleo centrale i nuovi processi identitari che si sviluppano sul sito di YouTube. Il manifestarsi di tali dinamiche, in paricolare per quanto riguarda le siutazioni di conflitto, chiama in causa e spesso rimette radicalmente in discussione sia la narrazione degli eventi contemporanei che la memoria del passato. Lo stesso fenomeno del conflitto, così come le dinamiche memoriali, culturali e identitarie ad esso collegate, sta subendo una profonda mutazione a vari livelli e, di fatto, si presenta oggi come un oggetto di studio la cui comprensione richiede una messa in discussione dei metodi classici d'indagine e rielaborazione dei dati. In particolare le recenti rivolte mediorientali hanno fatto emergere in maniera chiara la centralità del ruolo svolto dai social network e più in generale dalle diverse piattaforme multimediali online nella creazione e gestione di una narrazione complessa e condivisa che va progressivamente a sostituirsi  alle tradizionali "versioni ufficiali".
All'interno di un simile panorama ritengo che l'approccio semiotico possa, dialogando con le discipline storiche, condurre a risultati interessanti in termini d'analisi e, contemporaneamente, contribuire all'elaborazione di un orizzonte teorico comune. Il multiforme materiale presente sui siti web ha infatti caratteristiche radicalmente nuove che ci obbligano, pena la futura impossibilità di gestire e archiviare tali fonti "in rete", a ripensare i metodi classici della ricerca storica.
A partire da queste domande cercherò di tratteggiare le principali caratteristiche del materiale prodotto dall'attività degli "youtuber" e, con l'aiuto di alcuni esempi provenienti dal conflitto del Kosovo, cercheremo di capire quali modalità d'approccio analitico possano risultare più efficaci.

Germany 1925: Ernst Friedrich, a young anarchist, publishes a book composed only of photos and
captions: “War against War!” His goal is to employ the horrors of the war against the war itself,
against the false narratives of the militaristic rhetoric. The choice of using the photographic language
has a double purpose: on the one hand it allows the author to avoid the translation related problems
and, on the other hand, it was considered to be an intrinsically truthful medium. In this article I
analyze the structure of this visual route through the horrors of the war highlighting the peculiar
semantic dynamics which produce its unmasking effect. In particular I examine the inner structure of a
set of 24 close-up of disfigured faces which constitutes the last and the main section of the whole
sequence.

Aaron Swartz: a Different Kind of Hero.
My paper aims to investigate the collective building process of the "Hero" in the contemporary
online environment. In a socio-semiotic perspective this peculiar actor is the one who represents an
entire community in front of itself. For this reason, defining the features of net-heroes could be
useful in order to describe an ongoing wide social change. Which skills characterize them? Which
moral values they represent? Who are their enemies? In order to seek an answer to these questions,
I'll analyze the contributions to the online memorial page of Aaron Swartz.
Aaron Swartz was a brilliant computer programmer, a hacker and a political activist. He was a
research fellow at Harvard University and actively involved in the development of Reddit, Creative
Commons and RSS. As an activist, he was co-founder of "Demanding Progress" and one of the
leaders of anti-SOPA protests. In July 2011 a federal grand jury charged him with 13 different
felonies for downloading and releasing for free 5 million academic journal articles. During the night
between the 10th and the 11th of January 2013, he committed suicide in his apartment in Brooklyn.
The death of Aaron represents, on different levels, a crucial point in the ongoing struggle for
freedom of knowledge and participation; the "Freedom to Connect", as Aaron used to call it. The
slippery slide of Mass Media Society in the Internet Age has produced a hybrid situation in which
two totally different communication and power systems coexist in a temporary precarious balance.
Mass Media and Online Media are based on two different technological structures which basically
produce different actors, identities, communities and, above all, practices. To be brief, online social
practices tend to produce and to rely on different semiotic systems. The ongoing effort of powerholders
to control the online environment is, as Aaron himself underlined, a sort of translation
effort: "There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the internet
in terms of traditional things that the law understands..."
Aaron was one of the activists who truly believed in the rise of a new awareness among internet
users and in the ethical dimension of the struggle against capitalistic communication systems.
Distant form naive optimistic positions and in the meantime aware of the issues at stake, he
promoted the fight against those "powerful people who wanna clamp down on the Internet." His
suicide, closely related to his indictment, provoked a wide range of reactions. From Anonymous to
single academic scholars, a lot of different communities decided to honour his death. In particular,
his parents and his friends decided to open an online memorial place/page. Although the practice of
using personal pages as places to commemorate the death of a friend is rather usual, especially in
the social networks, in this case the website structure seems to suggest a monumental intent.
Nevertheless, the creation of this online monument is completely put in the hands of the users who
can leave a message on the endless scroll page.

"“Person of the year: You.”- Time, 25 December 2006. Two months before Google Inc. has bought YouTube for 1,65 billions. Today over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. Evidently something new and invisible started that day. Probably #Occupy Movement is only the first wave of a larger underwater social change.
Starting from this point my article aim to investigate the complex relation between User Generated Content websites (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, ecc.) and the new Forms of Dissent. Obviously an exhaustive analysis of a wide and complex topic like this requires a more deep and extensive treatise. In this article I only try to chart a route from the coming of a new technological element like the “hyperlink” to the development of new social concepts like “participative culture” and “performing citizenship”. Actually UGC systems are not only an easier and faster way to communicate and new forms of dissent aren't “new” only because of it. UGC websites constitute the environment for the surfacing of different sets of practices, strategies and maybe life forms. Between mass-media and UGC systems there is a fundamental change in relations of production. The new actor on the scene, the prosumer, is a subject who daily produce and consume digital goods for free. In order to detect some key points of this new frame of performativity and to define what kind of “we” can be created by the connection of a lot of “you”, I start defining the actorial position of the subject inside both systems and than I continue analyzing a specific call for media activism in the contest of Fitna controversy."

Published on Apr 11, 2016
No Country for Old Men is a 2007 movie directed, written, and edited by Joel and Ethan Cohen. Based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. Its enigmatic title actually comes from the first stanza of William Butler Yeast’s poem "Sailing to Byzantium", first published in the 1928 collection The Tower.

This film has been defined as a “neo-western movie” a description which fits it well. Except perhaps that the term neo might suggest that the Western genre is dead and buried.

In this video, I am going to analyse No Country for Old Men from both a narrative and visual point of view. This analysis will allow us to understand the meaning of that ending which has been unjustly defined as disappointing, arbitrary, strained and soulless.

This study examines the discursive and semantic patterns underpinning the collective
mourning activity on the digital memorial for Aaron Swartz (hacker/software developer/
activist). More specifically, it questions if and how online mourning for hacktivists might
result in a cultural reconfiguration of cyberspace through the grassroots and collective
redefinition of the limits of users’ agency. To this end, all the comments present on
Swartz’s digital memorial are collected, coded and, subsequently, analysed to detect
their narrative and semantic structures. The results of this linguistic analysis are
interpreted through a topological information model. Accordingly, the study discusses
(1) the hero-making processes underlying online mourning for hacktivists and (2) the
related redefinition of the Internet as the domain of a value-based community of users.

This article investigates the role and meaning of practices of erasure in contemporary Italian street art culture. Taking Blu's choice of cancelling all his graffiti in the city of Bologna as a case study, I will investigate the limits and possibilities of this artistic performance in both political and social terms. Given the antagonist yet dialogic and dynamic relationship that connects street artists, civic institutions and urban spaces, I will argue that practices of erasure are a key component of the particular form of communication occurring among these actors. Through the analysis of #OccupyMordor, one of Blu's most famous works, I will describe the relationship the author entertained with the city of Bologna highlighting, at the same time, the structural problems raised by institutional museification projects.

Germany 1925: Ernst Friedrich, a young anarchist and anti-militarist activist, publishes one of the first independent books composed only of photographs and captions: War against War! His stated goal is to employ classified pictures of the First World War (WWI) to unmask nationalistic propaganda and expose the false narratives of militaristic rhetoric. Published on the eve of the golden age of photojournalism, this book is the first grassroots attempt to use photography as a means of social and cultural change on a large scale. Through in-depth analysis of some key pictures, I will investigate the relation this series of images establishes with the beholder and the role it plays in shaping his visual experience. Emphasis will be placed on 24 closeups of disfigured faces which constitute the last set of this visually driven narrative. As I will seek to demonstrate, the complex array of pictures created by Ernst Friedrich testifies to a fundamental yet still embryonic change in the social perception of photography in the post-WWI Europe.

Since its formal approval, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project raised public concern about environmental sustainability and security. Thanks to the systematic use of Internet and communication technologies (ICTs), the nonviolent resistance organized by the Sioux tribes of Standing Rock Reservation to oppose the planned construction rapidly attracted public attention. In view of their strategic use of online video-sharing for documentation and counter-surveillance purposes, this study aims at describing how diverse modes of user activity are triggered by two different forms of distant witnessing: online video and live streaming. To this aim, this study analyzes the user activity which took place on the Digital Smoke Signals Facebook page, one of the most widely followed information outlets of the NO DAPL movement. Findings suggest that online video and live streaming trigger different forms of connective activity. The highlighted differences reflect the ways in which synchronous and asynchronous forms of online audio-visual communication impact users’ everyday life.