Ricerc@Sapienza

Digital platforms have the ability to connect people, organizations and resources with the aim of facilitating the core interactions between businesses and consumers as well as assuring a greater efficiency for the business management. New business concepts, such as innovative start-ups, are therefore created based on innovation, scalability and the relationships within the community around them. The purpose of this work is to deeply understand the evolution of business models brought by innovative and dynamic companies operating through online platforms.

Participatory Design (PD) has recently seen efforts to reinvigorate its political capacity, including reflections on the relations between its practices and institutions and a renewed political agenda in the contemporary stage of capitalism, such as the one of nourishing the common. This paper addresses both of these directions, questioning how a renewed political agenda of PD intersects the processes of institutioning in which PD itself takes part.

Although a great amount of research has been concerned with the growing relevance of crowdfunding for cultural productions, it is still little investigated how the actual functioning of crowdfunding platforms can affect both the way of conceiving and doing crowdfunding and the financing opportunities and performances of different projects. The article illustrates how this occurs in the case of an Italian crowdfunding platform, through activities of project classification and evaluation and campaign consulting it carries out, which are not visible from the outside.

This paper represents a first attempt to reconstruct a theoretical map of the relation between technology (digital media) and citizenship. We start from the reconstruction of the role of citizens in the smart city paradigm and then face the challenge that the so-called Big Techs move to the ideal of an engaged “smart community” by promoting an individual relationship between users/citizens and digital platforms.

Over the past ten years there has been a multiplication of digital technologies and webplatforms that enable to autonomously manage fund-raising, production, promotion, and distribution of musical projects. Such tools are often said to extend self-production and make it more efficient, allowing DIY musicians to more easily combine autonomy and sustainable income so as to develop DIY careers. However, the potential opportunities opened up by

Over the past ten years grassroots music production has been incentivized by an increasing number of web-platforms that allow to autonomously manage music promotion and distribution. The adoption of such tools has been fostered by the promise to facilitate the development of sustainable DIY careers, however is widely debated ‘how much’ and ‘for who’ they are actually able to do so, especially considering the wider changes affecting music production.

Il saggio esplora l'attività dei social bots in campagna elettorale

This essay explores potential risks associated with the proliferation of social bots on digital platforms. While it is evident from computer science scholarship that social bots play a key role in the spread of online (mis)information (Shao, Ciampaglia, Varol, Flammini, & Menczer, 2017), there is no sociological research on why bots act undisturbed on social networking platforms. Going beyond a merely technological approach, this paper aims at investigating the phenomenon of social bots from a sociological perspective.