Technologies, individuals and communities: the challenges for a cultural change

The first 2010 issue of Qwerty consists of an invited article and three studies. In the invited article, Kenneth Gergen focus on the reverberations of mobile communication, in particular of mobile phone use. First, he examines the role of mobile phone usage in bringing about transformations in communal life. Here he introduces the metaphor of the floating world, to facilitate an understanding of a new form of communal life made possible by the mobile phone. The creation of floating worlds generates a new form of insularity. It is not an insularity of individuals, of organizations, or nations, but an informal, micro-social fragmentation. Then some implications of this insularity for the socio-political landscape are considered. In the first study, Sanne Akkerman and Äli Leijen question how future students of higher education face and deal with the ambiguity in the online world. Based on literature and observations of youth and their use of interactive media, the authors propose that youth specifically face three challenges relating to ambiguity: maniness, multivoicedness, and dispersion. Youth use particular digital media in response to this ambiguity, respectively to explore, evaluate and narrate. The analysis of these central processes make clear what tasks are involved from the educational point of view. Eleonora Brivio and Francesca Cilento, in the second study, analyze the role of the perceived self-efficacy in the digital divide . The authors consider both the effect of the gender and of the way to use the computer in an Italian sample. The data obtained show that gender and age influence the ability to solve unexpected problems; otherwise the frequency in the computer use allows the development of a critical approach during Internet exploration. The role of computer mediated communication environments in political participation and active citizenship is the focus of the third study. Annarita Celeste Pugliese explores the in-group categorization process implied in the messages of a political leader and his voters written within the official weblog for the local council elections of the city. A content analysis revealed different content and levels of inclusiveness of the category “We”, used to construct collective identities and political consensus. Results are discussed according to the Social Identity Approach.