The Tidal Wave of Media. The Environmental Risk Between Reality and Representation

The traditional fears arising from disasters of a natural order (such as earthquakes or eruptions), or of a mixed order (a natural one, but resulting from degenerative changes in the environment caused by humans, such as floods and fires), seem more frequently to invade a sensitivity that is fuelling itself through the ubiquitous connectivity of the media, generating complex reactions on the imaginative level, on mythologies, and symbolic constructions, as well as, of course, on the level of social behaviours, political practices, and theorizations themselves. Our enquiry aims to examine some basic dimensions: 1. The representation of environmental disaster in the traditional media, with particular attention to television as a reservoir of memory and identity; 2. Those communication strategies which are more coherent with the contemporary imagination, to promote a widespread awareness of our being all players in the sustainable development process. To a first stage based on the expressive force of numbers, it will follow an analysis of personal experiences and glimpses of everyday life collected through various interviews, life’s stories and focus groups, in order to access the personal experiences and the points of view of the players, encouraging them to describe reality with their language and their terms, within a more complex subjective vision of the world. An enquiry path, then, which is preliminary to the elaboration of appropriate communication strategies suited to create an environment culture and to give life to an information typology which spares no efforts in handling the environment with the best tools, daily renewing the interest in these themes and, above all, concretely affecting our lifestyle.