The online academy is not a destiny

In the 60s Marshall McLuhan revolutionized the study of the media, a revolution that finds its perfect synthesis in the formula "the medium is the message". With this formula, the Canadian author highlights the fundamental role of the media in shaping any type of communication and more. In the sixty years that there ...

In the 60s Marshall McLuhan revolutionizes the study of the media, a revolution that finds its perfect synthesis in the formula “the medium is the message”. With this formula, the Canadian author highlights the fundamental role of the media in shaping any type of communication and more. In the sixty years that have separated us since then, the McLuhanian theory has in fact undergone numerous revisions. On the one hand, a certain determinist drift has been revised (De Kerchkove); on the other hand, digital media have shifted the emphasis from medium to hypermedia (Manovich, Bolter, Grusin).

One thing about McLuhan still remains valid in its entirety: an understanding of any society cannot be separated from 'analysis of the media structures that operate there. The NABA Media and New Technologies area pursues this approach: training cannot fail to deal with the media, at least at two levels. At a first level, the media are studied, and the contemporary technological acceleration requires constantly updated bibliographies. But at a later level, the media are applied to the project: the single medium, or even more effectively a hypermedia (a constellation of single media), are the elements that underpin the design so that its expressive possibilities, the effects of return on the public and users, etc. In short, media theory and practice are the ingredients of a self-sustaining educational process.

In the current context, in which the pandemic has forced the digitization of training, it is therefore essential to keep alive the questions that a media revolution such as the one we are experiencing involves:

1) What is the fate of bodies? If the scholastic architectural structure disciplines the bodies in a certain way, in what new way are the behaviors, the gestures of the bodies oriented in the new telematic context? (Foucault)

* What forms of control are in place? (Deleuze)

* Disseminated body, angelic body (Caronia)

2) What is the fate of the users? o How to prevent the 'student' from collapsing into the user '?

* Who are the users, and what their demographics?

> As the physical classroom softens the divides, what kind of diversity management is truly possible online?


> Psychological (Riva, Turkle)

> Social (boyd)

> Psychoanalytic (Twenge, Zielinski)?

As has already happened in history, the post-pandemic risks generating uncritical behaviors both in the direction of techno-enthusiasm (online is the scenario that will take over from the physical world) and of the apocalypse (we put the benches in the parks in front of the schools). The media area is both an observatory and a privileged laboratory to find an answer to the above questions and avoid unmediated adhesions to impending dystopias or nostalgia for the past.