“Public Communication of Science and Social Problems in the Age of Mediatization“

Over the past 30 years, human communication has increasingly depended on media to facilitate a vast array of activities. This tendency is termed “mediatization of society”, an overarching notion that denotes the relationship between advancements in the media arena and concomitant social and cultural transformations. The notion of mediatization has recently been utilized in the domain of public communication of science, as well as in the public discourse surrounding social issues, exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Given this premise, the aim of this study is to examine contemporary concerns and challenges impacting the public communication of scientific and social problems in the era of mediatization. To achieve this objective, the study begins with two established sociological theories, specifically systems theory and framing theory, and subsequently delineates how each might elucidate key mechanisms in the mediatization of science and social issues. By adopting framing theory, the research analyses three distinct domains of public communication of science and social issues: social, political, and news media communication. Cases derived from the Italian media landscape are examined and analysed within each communication domain. Research findings indicate a common inclination towards the objectification of data, directly associated with the premise that in the three aforementioned realms of public communication, communication methods presuppose that the topic at hand is discursively constructed to appear “true”.