Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 0:02
ICA presents.

Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Gianpietro Mazzoleni. He is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Milan and fellow of the International Communication Association. He is internationally known for his work on the impact of media on political systems and on the communication patterns of political institutions and actors. Co-founder and Editor of Comunicazione Politica, the Italian Journal of Political Communication, he is also a member of the editorial boards of various scholarly journals and editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Political Communication. Today, Gianpietro Mazzoleni will be in conversation with Cristian Vaccari, who is Professor of Political Communication and Co-director of the Center for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University. And here is Cristian.

Cristian Vaccari 1:05
I met Gianpiero- that's how we call him in Italian, Gianpiero- when I was a PhD student in Milan. He was not in the university where I was studying, and I was introduced to him through a colleague. And without having ever met him, and without probably knowing anything of my scholarship, which was developing at the time, he came across to me as the most welcoming, inclusive and insightful colleague I had ever met- no offense to everyone else that I had met before him. And as I came to know him, I very quickly learned that I was not the only one to think that. He has been instrumental in nurturing generations of scholars in international political communication research, not only in Italy, where were both are from, but beyond, as testified for example by the fact that he founded the Summer School in Political Communication in Milan, which he had run since 2007, and through which many young scholars who are now established scholars have passed. And also more recently, by his receiving of the David Swanson Award for Service to Political Communication Scholarship, jointly awarded by the Political Communication divisions of ICA and APSA. Gianpiero has published extensively and made substantial scholarly contributions, and we're going to have a chance to talk about it during this podcast. So I will give him the floor and start by asking him, what's your story, Gianpiero? How did you come to study political communication, and what motivated you?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 2:35
Thank you, Cristian for the nice words. How did I come to study political communication? Well, it might be a long story, but I'll make it short, of course. I had the chance and the opportunity, and I must say, also the luck, looking back now to the mid-60s, to be one of the early international students that attended American colleges in those days. Now it's kind of normal pattern. Many young people go to America to study, maybe for their master's degree or PhD. My case was after high school, I had the opportunity to win a scholarship from a private institution in Italy, and I could choose between the UK and the US to go for higher education and I chose the US. Well, that was really changing my life because, in those days, travel by air wasn't so easy, it was very expensive. So, I went for three years without returning back to my parents in Italy, and so I lived the full-time and full-immersion life in college at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. And eventually I decided after graduation to stay in the sociological or social sciences field for my doctorate.

Cristian Vaccari 4:00
How did you then become interested in communication?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 4:04
That has to do, again, with my American experience, so to speak. Because when I was there between 1966 and '69, as a foreigner, I was a bit lost in the complexity of American life. I didn't have any background preparations in American life, in American politics. But I became quickly interested in what was going on in the United States. Those were the days of the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. The riots were upsetting all the inner cities in the United States. The war in Vietnam was at its climax. The media coverage of the bloody battlefields in Vietnam was changing the Americans' support for the war. Not being an American citizen, I couldn't enroll myself in the Students for a Democratic Society, which was one leading movement in those days. But I followed closely what was going on on campuses. Of course, I listened to pop and rock singers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and watched the movie actors like Jane Fonda animating the demonstrations everywhere in the United States. And I remember very much the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. They nominated Hubert Humphrey, the candidate for the presidency. And then, unfortunately, in 1968, I remember very much the association of Martin Luther King and of Bob Kennedy. And Nixon, that year, won the presidential election, and he had also come to campus to speak. So all these things, eventually got me very much interested in communication and in political communication. And that's why eventually I pursued higher degrees in that sociological area.

Cristian Vaccari 5:57
That's very interesting and it speaks to how we develop an interest in understanding politics and the media through important experiences in our lives. It's not always born with us, but it can grow on us. Who were your mentors as you were a young scholar and entered the field?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 6:13
In my case, I must say that I can acknowledge two leading communication scholars, international scholars, that is Denis McQuail and Jay Blumler. I had the opportunity to work with both of them in different occasions, but especially at the first European election study in 1979 that gathered probably the best and leading scholars of political communication of those days. It was really the first comparative, huge European research project that was led by Jay Blumler. So I had the opportunity there to work as a postdoc in 1979. And I must say that probably there my scholarship took off and marked the first crucial steps. They were really mentors for my career.

Cristian Vaccari 7:04
So since 1979, you went a long way, were involved in a lot of very important projects published a lot, also you know, founded journals, associations. You had a lot of very compelling experiences. But as you reflect back in time, can you think about a highlight that you remember when you felt that communication had a real impact?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 7:27
Back in the '90s, in the mid-90s, Parliament passed a legislation in Italy that introduced the degree of communication and the university curricula. Well, it was a long-awaited decision, actually, anticipated by a long battle by most of us, who were not really senior, but already midway in their careers, because we voiced for reform, a recognition of communication science in the university because there was no teaching, no course of communication whatsoever. So eventually, that changed, thanks to the legislation and thanks to our pressures. So it was a happy development of an effort connected to communication and to promote communication science in Italian universities.

Cristian Vaccari 8:14
I think this is a very useful reminder that whatever the scholars are able to do now is not only the result of the institutions they inhabit right now, but also of the institution building that happened in the past, including establishing degrees, research programs, associations, journals, and so on and so forth. And it's also a reminder of how important organizations such as ICA are for the advancement of scholarship. I would like to know, from your perspective, what do you think are the big intellectual questions that we as communication scholars need to address in the next decade?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 8:47
I must say that I am all but nostalgic of the so-called "good old times", that is, when communication studies were focused primarily on mass media and on the asymmetrical sender-receiver relationship of mass communication. We knew fairly well who was communicating what to whom, by what medium, under what conditions, and with what effects, the famous five W's. After some time, I was myself feeling repetitious in my studies and in my research. We were applying things and paradigms and methodologies that had been already implemented by generations of scholars. Then the birth of the Internet, almost all of a sudden, and the diffusion of digital media marked disruption of the established mass communication paradigm. In other words, it disrupted our established scholarly contentment. For my generation, that represented a really mighty challenge. Now we know that the hybrid media system, that's the best domain to study communication, political communication, in our case. New strong theories being built does not dump all the old theories. So, there is a combination of the old theories kept as valid to explain the complexity of nowadays' communication reality. Well, that said, according to me, there are at least two largely unanswered questions still to be addressed that intrigue our scholarly community. The first one has to do with the disquieting problem of algorithms. How can we study the sender as we did in the past, when we were focusing on who said what, when much content nowadays circulating on the platforms comes to us following obscure logics? These logics get out of the hands of the creator of the algorithms themselves. We are starting to realize what are the side effects of this new issue of algorithms. If we look at the problem of this misinformation, of polarization, political polarization, the unintentional drive to homophily and the like, with disquieting potential effects on democracy by the way- look at the Trump case, for instance. So the second question, if possible, is even more unsettling. It has to do with artificial intelligence and what would be the implications of artificial intelligence in communication and in political communication. This is really a new frontier for research. And I know that some of our colleagues are focusing on getting a lot of money to study this new issue of artificial intelligence. Now, you might ask me, are you optimistic or pessimistic or to use the Umberto Eco's categories, apocalyptic or integrated? Probably it's too early to take sides. It remains in my feeling a profound concern, a concern that both the algorithms and the artificial intelligence issues are really serious challenges to what we have learned and we know about human social communication processes.

As I said earlier, communication is in a state, is in a historical era where it can and should make a difference. And as you were referring, we already have evidence that it does. So where do you think communication scholarship can make a major contribution to solving big societal challenges and opportunities of our time?

There have been important opportunities to researchers to tackle small and big problems that agitate politics, and media institutions and society at large. To be true, not all the solutions suggested or proposed by political communication scholarship have been embraced by politicians. Usually they are a bit wary not to follow intellectuals too much, especially when criticism comes up, because much research brings us to criticize the functioning of the system. And when criticism comes up, you can see really that communication science can make the difference, even though it's a long process and difficult process. Think of what happened around the case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, or more recently, to the communication public policies related to the pandemic in several countries, where there were scientists, virus experts, but at the same time, also communication experts, how to communicate better the measures to follow. So, there was a lot of debate everywhere in the Western world, at least. I must say that apart from some failures, and a lot of indifference for social science in general, and for communication science in particular, I believe that the often silent work of scientists, political communication scientists, and communication scientists in general, is in the long run more effective on public opinions on specific issues, like, for instance, what people think of climate change, than ad hoc rolling campaigns to make people sensitive about issues, which are also important. Most of our work is silent. It doesn't really break the news, very rarely. But still, I am optimistic in the sense, so I take side with the optimists here. I think that communication science has a lot to say. And it can make a difference in many political decisions, and in many domains, societal domains, and cultural domains.

Cristian Vaccari 14:44
Silent work that we do matters quite a lot. So I have a final question for you, which is, this podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarships. My final question to you is, what kind of architect have you been, and what have you built?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 14:59
Well, thank you for the question. It makes me smile because for the first time in my life, I must imagine myself as a builder, as a constructor worker, which is actually a good way of looking at the work of all of us. By applying the architecture metaphor, and looking back to my activity, I can distinguish two fields here where I probably built something. As far as the first instance is concerned, I might have been in the year 2000 a pioneer probably, surely an initiator, of the flood of studies about the impact of media in the rise and the spread of populism. Nobody was interested in that field. I was studying the Italian case. And there was another case, the Australian case, Pauline Hanson, the rise of early populism. So we looked at other cases, and we put together these cases- not really a comparative study in technical terms, but it's a comparative qualitative analysis of different cases. And so we published a book. I say "we" because I was the leading scholar, but there were also two brilliant, almost unknown Australian media scholars that helped me in putting together the pieces. So that was my contribution. Now, everybody studies populism, and it's very popular, so to speak. The second theoretical contribution, is the development of the concept of mediatization of politics. I have been working on that concept since the early '80s, departing from the seminal work by Altheide and Snow on media logic. And I was highlighting, using their category, the implication of media logic in the media coverage of political events and leaders, and the effect on political communication. And the third theoretical contribution has been based on, again, qualitative analysis of political communications by using the infotainment and the politainment categories in both the popular media and more recently on the web. I wrote two books together with two younger co-authors that marked the field of pop politics and political memes- how the web can be, through the memes, a source of strong and effective political communication and political participation. And last but not least, I must say that I was honored in this case to be appointed by the ICA and by the late and esteemed colleague Wolfgang Donsbach as editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, published by Wiley on behalf of the ICA. Well, I must say that that was probably the most rewarding professional experience because I was engaged in dissecting the beating heart of the multiform discipline of political communication with fabulous scholars from around the globe for three years. That was really something that fulfilled my secret inner wishes of doing something memorable for me and also for the discipline. On the more organizational front, my long partnership with Paolo Mancini, very well-known colleague around the world, we were very much engaged in launching, strengthening the institutional setup of the discipline in Italy. That pushed us to create something completely new for Italian academia, for the Italian political communication domain, that is a new journal, a refereed journal, Comunicazione Politica, back in 2000 and I edited for 13 years. It's indexed in Scopus and also pushed us to found something that didn't exist, the Italian Association of Political Communication, that gathers almost everybody involved in the field of research or political communication. And then finally, what you mentioned at the beginning- in 2007, I had the idea to put up an International Summer School of Political Communication, exploiting my personal knowledge of many top scholars in the area of political communication. I said, "Why don't we invite some of these top people in Milan to teach and to engage with younger generations that want to enter the field of political communication?" According to some students that I met later, they said, "Gianpietro, that was really life-changing experience for me." And that was really something good to hear, because it's something that you pass on to the new generation.

Cristian Vaccari 19:54
I am very grateful to you for your scholarship, as I'm sure many other colleagues are. I'm very grateful to you for your mentorship, as I am also sure many other colleagues are, young and less young. And I'm grateful for your time. It's been a very fascinating journey into a lifetime of achievements, of mentorship, and of insightful innovations in the field of communication. You are indeed an architect of our scholarship. And we're all standing on what you've built and standing on your shoulders as well as those of many others. Again, it's been a great pleasure and an honor as a friend, and as someone who has moved his first steps in the discipline with some meaningful support from you, to interview you. I wish you all the best for the years ahead.

Gianpietro Mazzoleni 20:41
Thank you, Cristian. Thank you for the interview.

Ellen Wartella 20:45
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about this episode, host and architect, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description.