New models of integrated environmental communication to ensure a sustainable development

This contribution aims to highlight the central role of communication and its strategic value in the development of a culture of sustainability. The concept of sustainability has focused so far above all on ecological,... [ view full abstract ]

This contribution aims to highlight the central role of communication and its strategic value in the development of a culture of sustainability. The concept of sustainability has focused so far above all on ecological, environmental issues and sustainable development. The state of crisis of environmental communication that is part of the deeper fracture in the relationship between citizens and Institutions has point up that a different approach to the concept of sustainability is needed. We live in a social environment where the flow of messages is continuous and incessant and consists at the same time of those we receive and those that we produce by ourselves, the power of click. We are immersed in this universe where the flow of words, images overwhelms us even when we believe to be protagonists. Individuals have lost the ability to deepen, the time of rationalization, of intellectualization. As Jenkins states: "The social production of meaning is something more than the multiplication of individual interpretations; it involves a qualitative difference in the ways in which we give meaning to cultural experiences, and in this sense implies a profound change in the ways in which we understand the theme of competences. [...] there is a need for skills to work within social networks, to share knowledge within a collective intelligence, to negotiate through the cultural differences that characterize the assumptions that conduct the different communities and to reconcile the fragments of conflicting information in order to form a coherent picture of the world around them. "(Jenkins H., 2010)

It is necessary to overcome the sectorial nature of environmental communication to integrate it into a broader concept. The notion of participatory culture introduced by Jenkins, where individuals contribute through basic communities to produce meaningful contents together with the ability to find solutions to common problems and share these positive experiences so that they become opportunities for a social and cultural growth, is one of the most innovative theory in the communication sociological field. On the basis of this theoretical assumption we can identify new educational tools that exploit SNS environments as a space for informal learning and sharing of social behaviors oriented towards sustainability. These paths must become an integral part of scholastic programs and must be designed according to a cross-cutting principle between the different subjects. Only in this way the sustainability culture can become an individual heritage providing an interpretative key and a criterion of social action such as to affect the construction of social relations with a real impact on development models.