Francesca Comunello
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 660167 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Francesca Comunello |
| NOMBRES | Francesca |
| APELLIDO | Comunello |
| FIRMA | COMUNELLO F |
| AFILIACIONES | Sapienza University of Rome |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5845-5807 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 67 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2012 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Victims or empowered entrepreneurs? Media constructions of sex workers in Italy and Belgium
As digital platforms and neoliberal discourses contribute to reshaping notions of visibility and empowerment, understanding how sex work is framed becomes increasingly important. The representation of sex work in mass media plays a crucial role in shaping public perceptions and influencing policy debates. This article investigates the representation of sex work in online newspapers through a comparative analysis of headlines and images in Italian…
Lost in Representation
This contribution explores LGBTQIA+ adolescents’ perceptions of the representations and self-representations of LGBTQIA+ subjectivities in digital media, with particular attention to the tensions between visibility, authenticity, and recognition. Drawing on 21 in-depth interviews with young people aged 16 to 18, the study investigates how online queer visibility is received, filtered, and sometimes rejected by LGBTQIA+ individuals. In this contex…
‘Maybe he will send the video on to someone, to some of his friends…’
This paper examines how Italian teenagers construct meanings, norms and boundaries around sexting within their everyday digital cultures. Drawing on six vignette-based focus groups with 49 participants aged 16-18 years, the study used a media practice approach to analyse how teenagers collectively interpret a hypothetical sexting vignette. Findings show that participants overwhelmingly rely on heteronormative scripts, reproducing the dominant "gi…
Double standards of generative AI chatbots
The article addresses the age-based biases embedded in artificial intelligence systems (AI ageism) from a sociotechnical perspective. Building on studies about digital ageism and research on the sociocultural imprint of generative AI, we interviewed five popular generative AI chatbots as communicative partners to expose and question potential ageist and sexist stereotypes (namely, those surrounding digital users) embedded in/reproduced by these s…
Gender, Intimacy, and Digital Practices
The relationship between digital practices, gender, and intimacy in teenagers’ everyday life is gaining growing attention. We can look at digital media as environments that offer young people agency and spaces where they can construct and perform their identity (boyd 2014) through bricolage practices (Willett 2008) and by experimenting with their own selves, also with regard to gender and intimacy (Ferreira 2021; Metcalfe & Llewellyn 2020; Scarce…
A media ecology of ecological media? Conceptualizing environment-oriented communication and its digital footprint in climate change activism
Recognizing the role-played by mainstream social media (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, etc.) in climate activism, this article focuses on how FridaysForFuture (FFF) Rome’s activists navigate and negotiate with digital platforms, unveiling strategies and beliefs related to platform-sustainability. Through multimethod qualitative research, we account for online and offline activist practices across multiple media platforms and explore the criteria guidi…
Natural and environmental risk communication
This paper discusses natural and environmental risk communication and presents the findings of a scoping review that set out to identify campaign experiences, concrete applications, and tools. The 125 papers reviewed were selected based on the principle of intentionality in the design and dissemination of communicative devices. The papers demonstrate the complexity of risk communication and the flexibility of the tools provided. The literature ma…
‘I’m not bad, I’m just … drawn that way’
The paper aims at creating a bridge between media and migration studies and critical algorithm studies. By adopting a media ecological approach and a mutual shaping of technology and society perspective, in this paper, we explore the factors that lead, especially in Italy, to discriminant and stigmatizing image search results, related to specific groups of immigrants living in the country. We performed a content analysis of Google-Images search r…
Brushing Society Against the Grain
This article explores the growing role of traces and footprints in social science, giving an outline of the main concepts and empirical questions discussed in this special issue. Remarkably, the study of traces (unobtrusive, necessarily interpretative, theory-driven and data-fueled at the same time) considers them as unwillingly insightful and strategic materials. However, the difference between information "intentionally transmitted" and informa…
Exploring the vaccine conversation on TikTok in Italy
TikTok, a social media platform for creating and sharing short videos, has seen a surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. To analyse the Italian vaccine conversation on TikTok, we downloaded a sample of videos with a high play count (Top Videos), identified through an unofficial Application Programming Interface (consistent with TikTok's Terms of Service), and collected public videos from vaccine sceptic users through snowball sampling …
Online Hate Speech as a Moral Issue
Taking a neo-Kohlbergian approach, we explore the moral reasoning of 486 young Italian users of social network sites exposed to moral dilemmas concerning online hate speech. The aims are to understand what moral reasoning schemas they use as they face homophobic, racist, or sexist online hate speech, and what influence personal values and moral disengagement might have on their moral reasoning process. The results reveal the prevalence of Maintai…
Does the "Platform Society" Mean the End of the "Network Society?" Reflections on Platforms and the Structure and Dynamics of Networks
Scholars and journalistic accounts have devoted growing interest to the centralizing trends characterizing platforms and the "platform society." They often oppose this model to the alleged openness, horizontality, and "equality" they attach to "networks." Such depictions seem willing to give up on a thorough consideration of network structure, which appears nowadays less fundamental to reflect on the digital world (and society) than it was 25 yea…
What People Leave Behind
This open access volume focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”.
Understanding the vaccine stance of Italian tweets and addressing language changes through the Covid-19 pandemic
Social media is increasingly being used to express opinions and attitudes toward vaccines. The vaccine stance of social media posts can be classified in almost real-time using machine learning. We describe the use of a Transformer-based machine learning model for analyzing vaccine stance of Italian tweets, and demonstrate the need to address changes over time in vaccine-related language, through periodic model retraining. Vaccine-related tweets w…
How the Italian Twitter Conversation on Vaccines Changed During the First Phase of the Pandemic
In the context of the European Joint Action on Vaccination, we analyzed, through quantitative and qualitative methods, a random sample of vaccine-related tweets published in Italy between November 2019 and June 2020, with the aim of understanding how the Twitter conversation on vaccines changed during the first phase of the pandemic, compared to the pre-pandemic months. Tweets were analyzed by a multidisciplinary team in terms of kind of vaccine,…
Towards ‘romantic media ideologies’
The article addresses the teenagers’ perception of those forms of teen dating violence that occur on digital media (i.e., ‘digital dating abuse,’ DDA), such as snooping around, controlling behaviors, and aggravated sexting. It contributes to the strand of studies on DDA and those on the mutual shaping relationship between technology and society by focusing on the interplay between social media usage practices and dating practices among teenagers …
Youth Activism for Climate on and Beyond Social media
The FridaysForFuture movement (FFF), launched by Greta Thumberg's school strikes in 2018, has led a new wave of climate activism worldwide. Young people are at the forefront, with social media serving both as mobilizing tools and expressive spaces. Drawing upon literature on youth and digital activism with a generational, situated approach, we account for how both the climate struggle and social media are appropriated by FFF-activists as part of …
Youngsplaining’ and moralistic judgements
In this paper, we explore ageist depictions of both young and older people as they emerge from discourses addressing ‘other people's’ digital media usage practices. We carried out eight focus groups (four with teenagers, four with people aged 65 or older) in two southern European cities (Rome and Barcelona). By negotiating the affordances and constraints of (digital) tools and platforms, people develop their own usage norms and strategies, which …
What People Leave Behind
The In(ter)dependencies of Mobile Online and Offline Spaces
Mobile media technologies place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, opening up new environments of affordances. In everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are increasingly interdependent and interwoven in manifold ways. Practices, experiences, meanings and expectations are negotiated across these spaces, while at the same time they are bound by the respective logics and limitations, leading t…
Negotiating gender scripts in mobile dating apps
The paper explores the perception and negotiation of gender representations and scripts among Italian dating app users. Adopting a gender perspective and a socio-technical framework, it describes how dating app affordances support the performance of gender scripts and explores how users negotiate gender scripts. We conducted 8 focus groups involving 39 dating app users from a variety of gender and sexual orientations. The results show how shared …
I do it my way”
This article analyzes the idioms of practice and media ideologies of adolescents and older adults regarding mobile digital media usage, and how they are negotiated within and between age cohorts. We formed aged-based focus groups in Rome and Barcelona (four groups of 16- to 19-year-olds and four of 65- to 85-year-olds). The comparison provides new insights on older individuals’ communication practices, often overshadowed by the focus on youth. Pa…
Feminicidio and #NiUna Menos
This article analyzes the Twitter conversations carrying the hashtag #NiUnaMenos produced in Argentina during the time of the marches in 2015, 2016, and 2017, by adopting a quali-quantitative method. After describing the origins of NiUnaMenos, we illustrate the mobilizing force of femicide in a context of technopolitical use of social media by women's movements. Data analysis diachronically shows to what extent and in what terms conversations on …
ICTs for Community Development
The aim of this special issue is to collect and put into dialogue theoretical, methodological, critical, and applied contributions dealing with the variety of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) uses in community development. In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide the readers with a quick overview of the field, conducted by analyzing the lexicon of titles and abstracts published in the past few years in information…
Shaken and stirred
In this paper we examine the use of Twitter and Facebook in two dramatic earthquakes that hit Italy: L’Aquila (in 2009) and Emilia (in 2012). Indeed, disasters disrupt everyday life and engage people in meaning-making processes aimed at recovering meaning and control of their world. In these cases, we argue that the use of social media may contribute to social representations processes and functions: cognitive coping, social sharing of emotions, …
Will the revolution be tweeted? A conceptual framework for understanding the social media and the Arab Spring
The goal of this article is to build a conceptual framework for understanding the role of social media in the so-called 'Arab Spring', considering two different disciplinary perspectives: International Relations and Internet Studies. More specifically, it relies on literature on Middle Eastern political systems and on social network sites. It also refers to literature that examines the relationship between (social) media engagement and civic enga…
Feminicidio and #NiUna Menos
This article analyzes the Twitter conversations carrying the hashtag #NiUnaMenos produced in Argentina during the time of the marches in 2015, 2016, and 2017, by adopting a quali-quantitative method. After describing the origins of NiUnaMenos, we illustrate the mobilizing force of femicide in a context of technopolitical use of social media by women's movements. Data analysis diachronically shows to what extent and in what terms conversations on …
I do it my way”
This article analyzes the idioms of practice and media ideologies of adolescents and older adults regarding mobile digital media usage, and how they are negotiated within and between age cohorts. We formed aged-based focus groups in Rome and Barcelona (four groups of 16- to 19-year-olds and four of 65- to 85-year-olds). The comparison provides new insights on older individuals’ communication practices, often overshadowed by the focus on youth. Pa…
The 'Proper' Way to Spread Ideas through Social Media
Social media have become a relevant arena for different forms of civic engagement and activism. This article focuses on the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as they are perceived by Italian activists. Instead of focusing on single protest movements, or on single platforms, we adopt a media ecological approach and consider a variety of environments where people can choose to express protest-related content. Our main …
Youth Activism for Climate on and Beyond Social media
The FridaysForFuture movement (FFF), launched by Greta Thumberg's school strikes in 2018, has led a new wave of climate activism worldwide. Young people are at the forefront, with social media serving both as mobilizing tools and expressive spaces. Drawing upon literature on youth and digital activism with a generational, situated approach, we account for how both the climate struggle and social media are appropriated by FFF-activists as part of …
Women, youth and everything else
In the context of an international research project on older people’s relations with and through mobile telephony, Italian participants spontaneously provided narrations on mobile phones that appeared to be structured around strong stereotypes. Respondents show a twofold representation of mobile phones either as a simple communication tool or as a ‘hi-tech’ device, which generates multifaceted stereotypes. More specifically, when the mobile phone…
Youngsplaining’ and moralistic judgements
In this paper, we explore ageist depictions of both young and older people as they emerge from discourses addressing ‘other people's’ digital media usage practices. We carried out eight focus groups (four with teenagers, four with people aged 65 or older) in two southern European cities (Rome and Barcelona). By negotiating the affordances and constraints of (digital) tools and platforms, people develop their own usage norms and strategies, which …
ICTs for Community Development
The aim of this special issue is to collect and put into dialogue theoretical, methodological, critical, and applied contributions dealing with the variety of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) uses in community development. In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide the readers with a quick overview of the field, conducted by analyzing the lexicon of titles and abstracts published in the past few years in information…
Older people and smartwatches, initial experiences
take older people's interests into account
User-Generated Video Gaming
Digital technology users are growingly involved in what has been described as convergence culture or participatory cultures. In this context, a major role is played by user-generated content. This article focuses on the participatory practices related to Little Big Planet (LBP) 1, a PlayStation platform video game that encourages users to create and share their own gaming levels. Our theoretical framework refers both to convergence culture and to…
Networked Sociability and Individualism
The aim of this introductory chapter is to offer a brief overview of the main conceptual perspectives that are shared by all of the chapters in this volume. I will therefore briefly introduce Wellman and Castells' understanding of networked individualism and networked sociability, describing the shift from communities to networks and underlining that networked individualism does not lead to isolation, but instead gives rise to new patterns of soc…
Will the revolution be tweeted? A conceptual framework for understanding the social media and the Arab Spring
The goal of this article is to build a conceptual framework for understanding the role of social media in the so-called 'Arab Spring', considering two different disciplinary perspectives: International Relations and Internet Studies. More specifically, it relies on literature on Middle Eastern political systems and on social network sites. It also refers to literature that examines the relationship between (social) media engagement and civic enga…
Digital Divides in Europe
Recensione del testo di Panayota Tsatsou dal titolo "Digital divides in Europe" pubblicata dall'autorevole rivista Information, Communication and Society. Over the past 15 years, digital divide scholarship has diffusely focused on economic and technological dimensions (in terms of physical availability of devices and conduits), often disregarding any socio-cultural considerations and proposing simple, dichotomous models, building on the classic “…
User-Generated Video Gaming
Digital technology users are growingly involved in what has been described as convergence culture or participatory cultures. In this context, a major role is played by user-generated content. This article focuses on the participatory practices related to Little Big Planet (LBP) 1, a PlayStation platform video game that encourages users to create and share their own gaming levels. Our theoretical framework refers both to convergence culture and to…
The 'Proper' Way to Spread Ideas through Social Media
Social media have become a relevant arena for different forms of civic engagement and activism. This article focuses on the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as they are perceived by Italian activists. Instead of focusing on single protest movements, or on single platforms, we adopt a media ecological approach and consider a variety of environments where people can choose to express protest-related content. Our main …
Older people and smartwatches, initial experiences
take older people's interests into account
Tra risposte protocollate e «social sensing». L'uso dei social media per la comunicazione d'emergenza nelle istituzioni locali italiane
Il ruolo dei social media nella comunicazione di emergenza è ormai riconosciuto dalla letteratura, soprattutto in ambito internazionale, e sta acquistando crescente visibilità anche a livello di pratiche diffuse e di discorso pubblico. An- che nel nostro Paese quote crescenti di cittadini si rivolgono ai social media, in occasione di emergenze e disastri naturali, per ottenere e diffondere informazioni, cercare o fornire supporto, condividere emo…
Women, youth and everything else
In the context of an international research project on older people’s relations with and through mobile telephony, Italian participants spontaneously provided narrations on mobile phones that appeared to be structured around strong stereotypes. Respondents show a twofold representation of mobile phones either as a simple communication tool or as a ‘hi-tech’ device, which generates multifaceted stereotypes. More specifically, when the mobile phone…
Shaken and stirred
In this paper we examine the use of Twitter and Facebook in two dramatic earthquakes that hit Italy: L’Aquila (in 2009) and Emilia (in 2012). Indeed, disasters disrupt everyday life and engage people in meaning-making processes aimed at recovering meaning and control of their world. In these cases, we argue that the use of social media may contribute to social representations processes and functions: cognitive coping, social sharing of emotions, …
I do it my way”
This article analyzes the idioms of practice and media ideologies of adolescents and older adults regarding mobile digital media usage, and how they are negotiated within and between age cohorts. We formed aged-based focus groups in Rome and Barcelona (four groups of 16- to 19-year-olds and four of 65- to 85-year-olds). The comparison provides new insights on older individuals’ communication practices, often overshadowed by the focus on youth. Pa…
Feminicidio and #NiUna Menos
This article analyzes the Twitter conversations carrying the hashtag #NiUnaMenos produced in Argentina during the time of the marches in 2015, 2016, and 2017, by adopting a quali-quantitative method. After describing the origins of NiUnaMenos, we illustrate the mobilizing force of femicide in a context of technopolitical use of social media by women's movements. Data analysis diachronically shows to what extent and in what terms conversations on …
ICTs for Community Development
The aim of this special issue is to collect and put into dialogue theoretical, methodological, critical, and applied contributions dealing with the variety of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) uses in community development. In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide the readers with a quick overview of the field, conducted by analyzing the lexicon of titles and abstracts published in the past few years in information…
The In(ter)dependencies of Mobile Online and Offline Spaces
Mobile media technologies place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, opening up new environments of affordances. In everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are increasingly interdependent and interwoven in manifold ways. Practices, experiences, meanings and expectations are negotiated across these spaces, while at the same time they are bound by the respective logics and limitations, leading t…
Negotiating gender scripts in mobile dating apps
The paper explores the perception and negotiation of gender representations and scripts among Italian dating app users. Adopting a gender perspective and a socio-technical framework, it describes how dating app affordances support the performance of gender scripts and explores how users negotiate gender scripts. We conducted 8 focus groups involving 39 dating app users from a variety of gender and sexual orientations. The results show how shared …
What People Leave Behind
This open access volume focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”.
Understanding the vaccine stance of Italian tweets and addressing language changes through the Covid-19 pandemic
Social media is increasingly being used to express opinions and attitudes toward vaccines. The vaccine stance of social media posts can be classified in almost real-time using machine learning. We describe the use of a Transformer-based machine learning model for analyzing vaccine stance of Italian tweets, and demonstrate the need to address changes over time in vaccine-related language, through periodic model retraining. Vaccine-related tweets w…
How the Italian Twitter Conversation on Vaccines Changed During the First Phase of the Pandemic
In the context of the European Joint Action on Vaccination, we analyzed, through quantitative and qualitative methods, a random sample of vaccine-related tweets published in Italy between November 2019 and June 2020, with the aim of understanding how the Twitter conversation on vaccines changed during the first phase of the pandemic, compared to the pre-pandemic months. Tweets were analyzed by a multidisciplinary team in terms of kind of vaccine,…
Towards ‘romantic media ideologies’
The article addresses the teenagers’ perception of those forms of teen dating violence that occur on digital media (i.e., ‘digital dating abuse,’ DDA), such as snooping around, controlling behaviors, and aggravated sexting. It contributes to the strand of studies on DDA and those on the mutual shaping relationship between technology and society by focusing on the interplay between social media usage practices and dating practices among teenagers …
Youth Activism for Climate on and Beyond Social media
The FridaysForFuture movement (FFF), launched by Greta Thumberg's school strikes in 2018, has led a new wave of climate activism worldwide. Young people are at the forefront, with social media serving both as mobilizing tools and expressive spaces. Drawing upon literature on youth and digital activism with a generational, situated approach, we account for how both the climate struggle and social media are appropriated by FFF-activists as part of …
Youngsplaining’ and moralistic judgements
In this paper, we explore ageist depictions of both young and older people as they emerge from discourses addressing ‘other people's’ digital media usage practices. We carried out eight focus groups (four with teenagers, four with people aged 65 or older) in two southern European cities (Rome and Barcelona). By negotiating the affordances and constraints of (digital) tools and platforms, people develop their own usage norms and strategies, which …
What People Leave Behind
Exploring the vaccine conversation on TikTok in Italy
TikTok, a social media platform for creating and sharing short videos, has seen a surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. To analyse the Italian vaccine conversation on TikTok, we downloaded a sample of videos with a high play count (Top Videos), identified through an unofficial Application Programming Interface (consistent with TikTok's Terms of Service), and collected public videos from vaccine sceptic users through snowball sampling …
Online Hate Speech as a Moral Issue
Taking a neo-Kohlbergian approach, we explore the moral reasoning of 486 young Italian users of social network sites exposed to moral dilemmas concerning online hate speech. The aims are to understand what moral reasoning schemas they use as they face homophobic, racist, or sexist online hate speech, and what influence personal values and moral disengagement might have on their moral reasoning process. The results reveal the prevalence of Maintai…
Does the "Platform Society" Mean the End of the "Network Society?" Reflections on Platforms and the Structure and Dynamics of Networks
Scholars and journalistic accounts have devoted growing interest to the centralizing trends characterizing platforms and the "platform society." They often oppose this model to the alleged openness, horizontality, and "equality" they attach to "networks." Such depictions seem willing to give up on a thorough consideration of network structure, which appears nowadays less fundamental to reflect on the digital world (and society) than it was 25 yea…
Natural and environmental risk communication
This paper discusses natural and environmental risk communication and presents the findings of a scoping review that set out to identify campaign experiences, concrete applications, and tools. The 125 papers reviewed were selected based on the principle of intentionality in the design and dissemination of communicative devices. The papers demonstrate the complexity of risk communication and the flexibility of the tools provided. The literature ma…
Computer Science (17 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras) · Social media (11 obras) · World Wide Web (9 obras) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (8 obras) · Social Media and Politics (7 obras) · Digital media (6 obras)