Communication Sciences (Academic Year 2020/2021) - Public Institutions and Digital Media

Even if no prerequisites and rigorous preliminary knowledge are requested, the course recalls and develops some of the issues already treated in the courses of General Semiotics and Literature and Transculturalism.

The course is meant to achieve three objectives; the achievement of each one of these corresponds to 6 lessons of the course (see the “Contents” section):

• Supplying the student with notions on the main theories, tools and methods of analysis of the semiotics of the media in its evolution from the Sixties to the present day
• Supplying the student with analytical competences and a systematic methodology supported by a critical approach when dealing with audiovisual media products
• Supplying the student with analytical competences and systematic methodology supported by a critical approach when dealing with multimedia products of vocal, graphical, hybrid, environmental type with a special attention on the mechanisms and expressive strategies of contemporary media

The course will deal with the following issues:  
 

The semiotic field and the media semiotics

The media semiotics: emerging figures and themes (1)

The media semiotics: emerging figures and themes (2)

The theme of experience between human sciences and experimental sciences

The mediated experience and medial experience

The semiotics of medial experience

The sensory definition (“What do I feel?”)

The existential definition (“Where am I?”)

The narrative definition (What happens/what happens to me?” / 1                                                   

The narrative definition (What happens/what happens to me?” / 2

The relational definition (With whom do I relate)”) / 1

The relational definition (With whom do I relate)”) / 2

The vocal media

The graphical media: the Web page

The graphical media: the press and the comics strip

The audiovisual media: the advertising commercial

Hybrid media: the videogame

Environmental media

 Beside the slides displayed during the videolessons, the exams are prepared studying the following texts:

1) Ruggero Eugeni, Semiotica dei media, Roma, Carocci, 2010;

2) Paolo Peverini, I media: strumenti di analisi semiotica, Roma, Carocci, 2012;

3) Ruggero Eugeni, La condizione postmediale, Brescia, La Scuola, 2015.

All the envisaged exercises (self-assessment tests, analyses of institutional campaigns, discussion of case studies) will allow the student to apply the theoretical and practical tools analyzed during the lessons.