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FABIO MASSIMO LO VERDE

Cyber-razzismo: la discriminazione razziale nella società digitale

Abstract

The spread of digital platforms offering the most varied services has certainly become pervasive in last ten years. And we mean by pervasiveness the property that connotes some processes (economic, social, cultural, but also cognitive, or, in another area, biological or natural), as well as some practices, to impose itself as a mode of action or legitimate, functional vision, etc. ., in most of the environments that constitute the area in which they decline themselves. Among these, it is, above all, the so-called social platforms - therefore the social networks, in the first place - that have shown a remarkable effectiveness in terms of pervasiveness, so effective to have determined a modification in the grammar and in the relational lexicons that order sociality among individuals in societies of the north and of the south of the world. This "bodyless sociality" (Lo Verde, 2014) via social networks, has indeed become the object of study of a large part of the sociology of contemporary media (see among all, Castells, 1996, tr. It., 2002; Castells, 2001, tr. It., 2002; Couldry 2012, tr.it. 2015; Lupton, 2015, tr. It., 2018; Orton-Johnson, Prior (eds), 2013; Marres, 2017) and gave birth to a very important line of studies defined, precisely, digital sociology which broadened both theoretical and methodological horizons of research on social life (for a review, see Lupton, cit., Orton-Johnson, Prior (eds) cit.). Starting from the observation that individual and social life is now a "digital life" (Lupton, cit., Tr. It., P. 1 et seq.) that is completely immersed in a system of practices in which the use of digital technologies are essential tools for carrying out activities in daily life but also used as sources to collect useful information to understand “what is happening in the world in which we live”, digital sociology recalls some questions that are at the basis of the traditional sociological theoretical debate. For example, questions related to associativity, sociability and sociability, quoting Baecheler (1996); but also the analysis of the relationship that is determined between social systems and technologies, in this case digital, making available categories, methods, techniques of analyzes that allow us to understand how contemporary social dynamics are evolving. Within this large container made up of digital sociology there are a large part of researches concerning the diffusion of an online sociality; but there are also studies concerning the spread of anti-social practices that certainly constituted the other side of society in history and which - following the same argument - thanks to the reduction of time and space that the world of the web allows, have taken on an equally wide spread. Among these, certainly the various practices of online bullying or of real denigration and threat towards individuals or social, ethnic, religious groups etc. In this paper we deal precisely with these forms in which prejudice and discrimination occur in cuber-space, in particular cyber-racism, one of the ways in which racism is declining in the world. It’s appear as a set of behaviors and attitudes certainly not born due of the diffusion of the net but which, precisely through digital technologies, is taking on much more pervasive anti-social connotations than those that have occurred in the societies of the past. Our basic theoretical assumption is that it is not just a practice that has found a new channel of expression in new technologies: what we want to support is, rather, that digital technologies amplify the effectivness of the phenomenon in consideration of specificity that present as new media. In short, in the change in the relationship between medium and user brought about by the introduction of digital media, the change in accessibility to the "thinkability" of anti-social behavior is also hidden. Once again, that is, it is evident that ... the medium is the message