The tsunami of media. The environmental risk between reality and representation

Our paper aims to examine: 1. The representation of environmental disaster in the traditional media, with particular attention to Tv as a reservoir of memory and identity; 2. The evolutionary dynamics of the social movements, with particular attention to the transition from commitment based on ideologies (e. g. political participation), to the symbolic dimensions anchored to the quality of life. 3. Wich are the communication strategies more coherent with the contemporary imagination, to promote a awareness of our being all players in the sustanaible development process.

Our paper aims to examine: 1. The representation of environmental disaster in the traditional media, with particular attention to Tv as a reservoir of memory and identity; 2. The evolutionary dynamics of the social movements, with particular attention to the transition from commitment based on ideologies (e. g. political participation), to the symbolic dimensions anchored to the quality of life. 3. Wich are the communication strategies more coherent with the contemporary imagination, to promote a awareness of our being all players in the sustanaible development process. The fears about environment calls into question a mediological, sociological and psychological point of view, as well as the scientific, economic and political one. Today the traditional fears arising from disasters of a natural order or of a mixed order (caused by humans and natural factors, that is a natural one, but resulting from degenerative changes in the environment caused by humans), are growing also because of the ubiquitous connectivity of the media, and so they affect increasingly the collective imagination as well as the social behaviours, political practices, and theorizations themselves. These dynamics is changing the patterns of collective participation: ecologist and environmental protests, which originated in the United States in the early Seventies and later spread throughout Europe, mirror the transmigration of the conflicts from the material to the symbolic production. In this context we present some evidence of national research we did about the representation of natural catastrophes in the media . Our essay aims to identify the role of the media in the dynamics which generate fear, and to explore which communicative strategies might be used to transform a terrifying and paralyzing hard catastrophic scenario, into a representation of nature based on sustainability and calls for individual responsibility. In other words, a media role that experiences the environment as neither miraculous nor traumatic, but rather as a common good to be cultivated both individually and collectively. In our opinion, the media use catastrophic narratives as a way for the construction of reality. But it doesn’t concern only the environmental processes. The same communicational plot it’s repeated copy cut for the difficult or bordering social fact, for the migrations, for all the peripheral and social weakness and sensitive problem (including the crisis). So, our enquiry aimed to examine some basic dimensions: 1. The representation of environmental disaster in the traditional media, with particular attention cinema and television as a provider of memory and identity; 2. The evolutionary dynamics of the social movements, with particular attention to the transition from commitment and participation based on ideologies (e. g. political participation), to the symbolic dimensions, often anchored to the growing attention for the quality of life. The action of the collective movements takes place in a limbo wherein values and expectations are created, where change has its origin, where the future is being designed and becomes present; 3. Those communication strategies, which are more coherent with the contemporary imagination, to promote a widespread awareness that we all play a part of our being all players in the sustainable development process. In addition to the various outputs of our research (scientific publications, a glossary of environmental terms, conferences and educational training in the schools and a website), we have made some audiovisual products, including a scenic design for a theatre performance on the catastrophe . After a first quantitative step we did an analysis of personal experiences of everyday life collected through various interviews, life’s stories and focus groups, in order to access the the points of view of the players, encouraging them to describe reality with their languages, in order to make clear a more complex subjective vision of the world. We found some trends of entertainment in the environmental communication:  The catastrophic event is due to human responsibility, not to natural disaster  Catastrophic and post-catastrophic stories are increasing in the movie industry (most of all in the USA)  There are a lot of issues taken from the catastrophic imaginary in comics, cartoons, fiction and videogames (the “Anna Politkovskaja” comics, the movies like “The day after tomorrow”, “ICY Age”, AVATAR, Deep Impact, Pandorum, I’m Legend, 2012, etc.)