Communication and Digital Emotions. The Desire of Community as A Dimension of the Existence

Simona Perfetti and Rosario Ponziano
Università Della Calabria

Abstract

The communication process is always a fundamental and essential process (Wright, 1976): it involves individuals in a deep relationship inside which the linguistic and paralinguistic codes, which come into play, take on complex meanings. In fact, despite the apparent facility through which two or more people come into contact among them, the deep sense of communication is something which is complicated and mysterious. Each person, who is involved in the communication process, attributes, on the basis of his/her subjective and social-group existential experience, his/her own meaning to each sign. According to Wolton (2006), communication has to do with four dimensions, which are complementary among them: first of all, communication is the ideal of expression and exchange which is at the origin of the Western culture and of democracy; talking about democracy presumes, as a basic concept, the existence of free and equal individuals. Communication concerns also those media which have remarkably transformed the relationships between communication and society. Still, communication concerns the whole mechanism of the new technologies that, with information science, telecommunications, audiovisuals and their interconnection, have globally modified the premises of the exchange of messages and power. In the end, communication includes also all those values, those symbols and those representations which function as a mechanism for the functioning of the public space, of democracies and of the international community through information and media. Today the advent and consolidation of digital media have expanded and, partly, modified the ways and contents of communication. In such perspective, the introduction of new media has an impact both on the evolution of the communication process and on the social context in which the media appear. Digital media create new kinds of action and interaction and new forms of social relationships, thus determining a complex restructuring of the dimensions of space, time and memory. All this leads the contemporary individual to feel alone in his/her choices of the behaviours because nobody is able to give certainties any longer, with the exception of the temporary and revocable certainties (La Marca A. 2016; Prensky, 2001).

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