Vita e Pensiero

F. Antonelli - R. Castrucci, Intellectuals’ Molecularisation and New Technologies in the Network Society In this essay we aim at analysing changes in the role of intellectuals in network society. After discussing how intellectuals have been a social and political élite during the first modernity, functioning as intermediaries, and enabling hierarchical and asymmetric order in industrial society, the essay analyses the main factors towards disintegration of this social order: decline of philosophy of Truth, rise of postindustrial and knowledge economy, spread of higher education, development of mass communication, and thus of new media. These processes have stimulated the emergence of new social subjectivities, namely knowledge workers, which have set in motion powerful disintermediation processes through the internet. On the one hand, the classical function of intellectuals has been partially absorbed by mass media, and on the other hand it has been superseded by a multitude of intelligence and opinion niches directly produced by citizen-consumers (intellectuals’ molecularisation). The resulting landscape consists in a strong balkanization of social and political world – particularly along generational and educational lines -, where, on one side you find a composite set of extremely fragmented intellectualities swarming through the Net (citizen-consumers), and on the other side masses of people still depending on mass media intermediation mechanisms (citizen-spectators). Key words: intellectuals, new technologies, public sphere, knowledge, long tail

S. Vergati, Micro – meso – macro: social network analysis as a set of research traditions and programs The article analyses first the disciplinary and epistemological contexts of SNA; after, it compares the different theoretical approaches referable to SNA: the structural, the formalist, and the interactionist one. Then, two main methodological approaches are being compared: the «hard SNA» and the «soft SNA», the first one – typical of the micro-analysis -- which considers the relational structure as the goal of research; the second one, which uses relational data as a tool for the theory building at the meso and macro levels. Further, SNA is proposed as an interdisciplinary and multi-purpose way-out from the theoretical dualism holism vs. individualism, particularly according to the structural interactionist approach. Finally, the four different explicative theories integrated in SNA (the theory of weak ties, the theory of the structural holes, the theory of clusterness, and the theory of relational coordination) are discussed as middle-range theories. Key words: social network analysis, micro-meso-macro level, structural interactionism, methodological individualism, holism.

G. Toscano, Field and Social World. Definitions and applications in comparison The aim of this paper is to compare the notion of «field» by Pierre Bourdieu e the sensitizing concept of «social world» by Anselm Strauss. Bourdieu and Strauss start from different theoretical assumptions: the former from a conflictual conception of society, the latter from a Symbolic Interactionist perspective. Nevertheless, both their concepts share the same stance, as they avoid a knowledge of social phenomena seen as «things in themselves» and they both reject an image of society fractured into units lacking mutual relations. Furthermore, both concepts emphasize a constant feedback between structure and action and assume the point of view of social aggregates. The issue has been analyzed considering problems of field and world visibility and the definition of their boundaries. Key words: field, social world, symbolic interaction, visibility, boundaries.

A. Caforio, Life and language of objets. Some anthropological hypothesis Some markings by very well known authors about object-centered love in Western societies and traditional ones have been well brought out in this article. For instance, Margaret Mead’s observations on the issue of the social role of object love teaching in first childhood bringing up have been properly seen into. Besides, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ sharp markings of symbolic object importance in regard to all societies have been looked into to a great extent in the same essay. Key words: objet, western societies, role, symbol, traditional societies.