The Construction of Communicative Space: The Nature of COVID-19 Information in Italy

The monopolistic role played by the pandemic offers a lens through which we can observe how the digital environment is reshaping the entire communicative space. Starting from Bourdieu’s concept of the “journalistic field”, what we now have is a situation in which the voices of journalists and of the public sector’s communicators are flanked by those of several other actors, who together are creating a polyphonic, multidimensional communicative space. Thanks to their communicative resources, they take on a unique role and position in the communicative space. Based on these premises, the present work aims to empirically explore how 10 different main actors within the sphere of public debate managed their communication strategies on Facebook during the Italian lockdown. In order to test the theoretical framework proposed here, we analyze 6 different kinds of communicative resource: reputational, institutional, professional, argumentative, performative and relational ones.