Modern times have certainly contributed towards the erosion of the mediation function of the school and of the family, in order to celebrate the value of direct experience, of subjective self-searching, and of the active exploration of the indi- vidual (Maffesoli, 1988).
The first critical problem regards the family: young people today are faced with a dimension which in the past was always a guarantee of stability but which today has been fragmented.
The weakening of this social institution dates back to the years of youth protest, when the bourgeois model with its functionalist nature, was condemned. According to this scheme, the task of the family was to contribute to the emancipation of the individual so as to guarantee an efficient social integration, the function of which was the maintenance of structural and cultural equilibrium. This model was thrown into crisis in the 1970s at the same time as the affirmation of educational and cultural
polycentrism and following a series of social transformations. It has lost the typical connotations of the institution, transforming itself into a social group, or indeed into a space wherein to construct projects of personal life, relationships, and affective and educative relations (Besozzi, 2006). We come, thus, to delineate a framework which it is difficult to circumscribe in a standard model. This is because the quality of the interaction between parents and children comes under scrutiny, which determines its educative efficacy in the process of construction of the self.
In spite of the heterogeneity and the complexity of the picture which has just been outlined, today the sense of the family still seems to be present in the universe of values of the individual. According to the findings of a recent national survey by ISTAT (2005), confirmed by more localised and restricted research, the family is to be found in first place among the values recognized by the young in the hierarchy of the “most important things,” in spite of the fact that relations within the domestic walls are in fact often conflictual, contradictory, and, therefore, difficult to reconcile with quality relationships. Besozzi (2006) describes this trend through a game of expectations and desires for the future, typical of the young, and closely connected to the sense of precariousness and of social uncertainty; in other words, for young people the family represents the symbol of security, of stability, and of protection compared with a reality which is fragmented and fragile. The value of this agency of socialization increases above all in the dimension of the imaginary, representing for young people the desire for stability as opposed to the state which is eternally transitory. However, if the family represents a value-refuge, it does not constitute a future projection around which to construct a project for living, probably because of the sense of individual responsibility and of subjective effort that the construction of a family nucleus involves (Besozzi, 2006).
The second critical problem regards the work crisis. In the past this represented an economic resource which led to a stable positioning in society, but it was above all a dimension which resulted in identity and socialization. The job determined a significant form of individual emancipation, functioning as an instrument of access and legitimization within social categories and classes, as well as a motor of mobil- ity and of meritocratic reward. The choice of flexibility, apparently comprehensible within the prospective of an enlarging of the job market, has resulted in a fundamental error: that of considering the question as merely economic, overlooking its function of socialization, of preparation for roles, and of the attaining of objectives, but above all of the construction of identity (Bauman, 1998). The modern society no longer provides a safety net for individual behaviour and the weakening of prescriptions regarding action and socialization, and the weakening of values and of behavioural norms has put the burden on the individual, who has become the protagonist not only of his or her choices, but also of defeats. Placing this weight and focusing at- tention on the individual, however, involves an assumption of responsibility for the sociocultural orientation towards action, causing the subject an increase in discomfort and difficulty in front of the many choices society presents.
An indicator of excessive individualism is given by the concentration of attention on the corporal, which is ever more the territory of recapitulation of the need for happiness and of subjective realization, and it is not chance that in these modern times, compared with the past, human beings have more consumer goods, through which they seek to satisfy the sense of satisfaction of the individual identity (Code- luppi, 2003). But the desired expectations, however, do not seem commensurate to the possibility of restitution: the increase in wealth and material goods corresponds paradoxically to a sharpening of the sense of discomfort. Society today seems to be less and less a dispenser of well-being and of participation, and has become a territory in which individual expectations take precedence by force, overriding the mediations upheld by society.
The third critical problem regards the educational improbability of the school system.
This more than other areas has suffered from the weakening of society’s capacity to transfer culture and knowledge which are not negotiable to the new generations.
In the past, values and knowledge were transmitted to young people, but what they assimilated was in reality the architecture of the adult age and the relative learning of that role. Today it is the school itself which is feeling the effects of the weakening of society and is in a state of crisis because it is still founded on traditional pedagogi- cal prescriptions which are ill adapted to the requirements and the characteristics of modern society. It is in the scenario of educational improbability that we see that the idea of school as a “parking lot” has become to an ever greater extent incorporated into the institution. It is here that we see the sense of an absence of values and a lack of communication particularly between the generations, except in those cases where the teacher, with significant effort, manages to regain the role of mediation.
Evidence of this is the increasing lack of interest of the young in the education, which is visible in the evident arrogance and vulgarity present to an ever greater extent in their attitudes and, on the other hand, in a decrease in the willingness of teachers to involve themselves more in the educational process. One of the triggering factors of this crisis, therefore, is the loss of confidence and of “faith” of the teachers; the school runs the risk of becoming a void-producing mechanism, because it produces architecture and schemes, but not culture.
To this we must add the rapid penetration of communication technologies in the social and cultural experience of the individual, which has intensified this perception of an emptying of sense. The media, in fact, by its technological nature, often gives priority to direct experiences of the use of the medium and stimulate processes of symbolic construction of individual and subjective realities, which therefore lack cultural filters. For this reason, those intellectual spaces through which the learning processes of the individual were often mediated in the past (such as, for example, the school and the family), are today in decline in comparison with the development of communication.
In the face of this transformation, the school has always had to confront the dilemma of its social function: should it uphold the conservation of a cultural heritage by the
transmission of what has been legitimated by tradition as “knowledge,” or should it risk adapting to innovation and to the changes which surround it, taking on the responsibility for filtering cultural forms and knowledge that are too new?
Since the 1960s a number of researchers have observed that over the course of time the school seems to have been over-concerned to affirm traditional values, giving priority to an abstract dimension, which was often coldly ultracognitive, to the detriment of those more concrete aspects which are connected to the develop- ment of the individual’s personality emotions (Alfassio Grimaldi & Bertoni, 1964, p. 63). This attitude was without a doubt consistent with the social characteristics and the dominant cultural model of those years, but it is a resistance which we have not yet left behind us. The scholastic institution still today, in fact, maintains forms of influence on the sociocultural condition which are present in the language and in the instruments of the media. Inevitably this conditions the position of teachers with regard to communication and risks compromising their passion for education, increasing the difficulty of adapting the content of the programmes to the expressive forms and dynamics of the media. The same condition reflects, moreover, on the students and removes value from the educational context, which is perceived and experienced as a place of socialization but not of learning and education.
Through communication, this institution can find again its cultural impetus and represent itself as the intellectual terrain in which and through which to interpret modern change. Technological progress is not enough to guarantee cultural sense and quality to the contents of the media; the channel and its signifier, which are present in the codes of the means of communication, are not enough to convey meaningful messages. As Luciano Galliani affirmed in the title of a thought-provoking book in 1979, The Process is the Message, certainly not the technology.
Intellectual space and critical comparison are also the basis of the cultural humus of media products. Investment in a communicative policy and ethic would, on the one hand, serve to rejuvenate, or rather reinvigorate, the expressive language and the contents of the media, balancing the processes of the handling of the communica- tive apparatus. On the other hand it would serve to re-establish, particularly in the action of consumption, situations of dialogue and symbolic comparison from which to stimulate a process of semantic construction of the experiences.
Through communication, the school could carry out its task of accompanying the young in this modern sociocultural evolution, observing and investigating in what way the changes affect and condition the need for identification, and modifying the dynamics of socialization in a project of intervention and qualification of the requests for participation, relationships, and comprehension of the modern world. In fact, if it is true that the young develop a harmonious relationship with the media from early infancy (Buckingham, 2004), it is also true that this naturalism is not always a guarantee of an equally natural acquisition of awareness of the mechanisms of the process, which are hidden in the construction of a message. For this reason, a pro-
gressive education in communication and in its languages (media education) could contribute to the development of an awareness of the sociocultural function and of the power to condition the media with regard to everyone’s symbolic universe. Only on this condition can the school become the preferred environment of the culture of change, taking back that role of mediation which will enable it, and also serve mass culture, to reclaim its function as guarantor of equal opportunities.