Media and narratives: representations of reality and social representations in the digital age. A case study on COVID 19

This research concerns the study of the subjective and emotional communication that in today's society invests communication at its various levels, mass media, TV, and, in particular, social media. It also involves linguistic procedures that characterize the complex phenomenon of the construction of post-truths understood as rhetorical- persuasive strategies in which the subjective and passionate component prevails over the referential one. In this thesis, we explored the subject placing it in the more general framework of the relationship between media content and media use, observing and trying to demonstrate that the tendency to polarized communication favors a partial and flawed understanding of reality and facts. Within the broad spectrum of information disorder, we investigated media phenomena that contribute to the strengthening and diffusion of these practices such as storytelling, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the tendency to ideological polarization within communication exchanges usually perpetrated through activation of cognitive bias, observing different methods, timings, and outcomes of traditional and digital media.