New) Media e culture civiche tra utopie comunicative e promesse partecipative

[Autom. eng. transl.] The paper intends to address the issue of civic cultures present on the internet starting from the theoretical debate on the network and its implications in relation to discourse and political practice. In the first part, the assumptions of the most recent reflections will be brought to light, highlighting the possibility that the web, as a place for discussion and tendency to be free and inclusive, can represent the embodiment of the ideal typical model of bourgeois public sphere, masterfully elaborated by Habermas (1962; 1981). Thanks to the interactivity, low production and distribution costs, to a new many-to-many communication structure, the new digital technologies would seem to allow the realization of a pure intersubjectivity, authentically oriented towards mutual understanding and not contaminated by acting. instrumental of political and economic systems. However, if we analyze the empirical researches conducted so far (among others Whilelm, 1999; Tsaliki, 2002; Wright and Street, 2007), we observe that, in addition to contributions that highlight a considerable deliberative capacity of online discussions, there are as many that , on the contrary, they highlight a profound gap between the normative ideal and the practice concretely implemented. Through a double track, inductive and deductive, we will try to prove how the radical contradictoriness of these empirical results is ultimately due to the problems inherent in the Habermasian model and to its inadequacy in grasping the complexity of the processes of political participation that take place on the network . More specifically, we will focus on the "cultural" deficit (Alexander, 1991) which distinguishes the Habermasian approach and which leads to a structural inattention to the dimension of symbolic meanings, identities and social positioning, thus ending up lending the side to the drifts of technological determinism (Lievrouw, 2002).