“L’immaginazione al potere”: Flaiano, McLuhan, il messaggio e il suo mezzo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay proposes a close examination of the journalistic work carried out by Ennio Flaiano in the Corriere della Sera (1967-1969) on McLuhan’s mediology. Its main focus revolves around the reconstruction of Flaiano’s contribution, as an interpreter of McLuhan’s work, to the birth of the sociology of the imaginary of media. In particular, it addresses Flaiano’s reflections on McLuhan’s axiom “the medium is the message”. His considerations are a testament to the wide diffusion of the Canadian sociologist’s ideas, reaching as far as Italy in the mid-sixties. In this socio-historic context, the article places Flaiano’s observations within the wider framework of Italian media culture at the height of the economic boom. In order to understand the thick cultural and sociological web in which this essay situates itself, it is necessary to draw the attention to a “meeting” between Flaiano and McLuhan. At the time when the Canadian sociologist and the Italian writer were both operational, the American cultural industry permeated the collective mindset and bolstered deep socio-cultural changes. Flaiano was attentive to the evolution of communicative languages and cultural shifts, as is apparent in his scripts for Fellini’s La dolce vita and 8 1⁄2. Flaiano covers a fair share of McLuhan’s mediological work in multiple, relevant articles in the Corriere della Sera, asking a number of meticulous questions that were nonetheless destined to remain unanswered. This can provide a possible response to the missing interview planned as part of the documentary Oceano Canada, filmed in Toronto, just a year before Flaiano’s demise (1971). As a result, this proposal focuses on Flaiano’s witty irony as an effective interpretative key of the evolution of media in digital era. This is why his disenchantment may result so useful to study and understand that (controversial) prophet of the global village of information, Marshall McLuhan.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".