Role of the Digital for the Third Sector in the Campania Region (Italy): From the Side of Research to the Side of the Objects in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to investigate the role of the digital in facing the social and practical impact of COVID-19 pandemic on particularly fragile and affected realities, Third Sector Organizations (TSO), in a context pervaded by structural and socio-economic weaknesses, the Campania Region in the South of Italy. It analyzes the digital object as: 1. a process - digitization/digitalization and digital transformation;2. a scenario - in which identities, activities and alternative spaces of use or data collection transit and are constructed;3. skills and capabilities - as social capital and value. This re-framing work is intended to be a useful tool for reflecting on the role of digital in research processes, while also offering a contribution in the debate on the Third Sector in contexts of crisis, such as the one generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, that impacts its existence, activity, shape, and perspectives. © This is an open access, peer reviewed article published under the Creative Commons License (CC BY 3.0).

Online tourism experiences: exploring digital and human dimensions in in-remote destination visits

Fully online tourist experiences remain a largely unexplored area of inquiry, as a valuable and meaningful traveling modality per se, beyond any connection with conventional tourism. This explorative study aims to advance knowledge on the role of human and technology dimensions in shaping the online tourist experience during the pandemic. A sample of 9,300 Airbnb Online Experience reviews of thirty-four online destination experiences was analyzed. A typology of four fully online tourism experiences is presented, such as individual escape and personalized learning, meeting the destination, meeting the host and social bonding. The research reveals the dynamic evolution of the fully online tourist experience during the pandemic, highlighting the strengthening role of the human dimension and the human-to-human interaction, despite the digital mediation of the in-remote destination visit. Avenues for destination management and marketing research and practice spring from the analysis of fully online tourist experiences as a form of virtual tourism. 完全在线的旅游体验仍然是一个很大程度上未被探索的领域, 作为一种有价值和有意义的旅游方式, 超越了传统旅游的任何联系. 这项探索性研究旨在增进对人类和技术维度在大流行期间塑造在线旅游体验中的作用的认识. 对34个在线目的地体验的9300个Airbnb在线体验评论样本进行了分析. 介绍了四种完全在线旅游体验的类型, 如个人逃生和个性化学习、与目的地见面、与主人见面和社会联系. 这项研究揭示了疫情期间完全在线旅游体验的动态演变, 突出了人的层面和人与人的互动的强化作用, 尽管远程目的地访问是数字媒介. 目的地管理和营销研究与实践的途径来源于对作为虚拟旅游形式的完全在线旅游体验的分析. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The Vaccine Is Now Here. The State-Regions Governance Between Converging Plans and Diverging Digital Communication

This article aims to present an analysis of State-Regional governance in relation to the Italian vaccination campaign, with the objective of identifying possible elements of divergence and convergence on three points. The first refers to the regulatory dimension of the campaign, which ensures the management plans of the national campaign and individual regional plans. The second relates to the implementation area of the provisions concerning data on allocation and distribution of both vaccines and vaccinated people. The third, instead, concerns the institutional communication of vaccines on Facebook institutional profiles. It introduces an analysis of public communication on the anti-Covid-19 vaccine, from December 20, 2020 (a few days before the start of the campaign) to June 30, 2021, six months after in a moment in which the numbers of contagions were beginning to show a definite containment. It examines the central level of communication, i.e., the communication campaign of government actors, and the regional level, i.e., the institutional communication of regional Governorss through their respective social profiles. Facebook posts were extracted via API programs and analyzed by a quantitative content analysis. The results show an institutional scenario that goes in two directions. In opposition to a normative and implementation level that is more coherent and less divergent, there is an extremely fragmented communication context with elements of contradiction between State and Regions. The latter would respond to primarily political logic (at disagreement with the governing coalition) to claim intervention priorities and-in implementation-to change the local territorial allocation of vaccines. The communication dimension thus turns out to be a very relevant component of vaccination governance mechanisms: not decisive for the actual implementation of the campaign, but very functional for the creation of new storytelling and thus likely political consensus. © 2022, Padova University Press. All rights reserved.

Mapping the story, telling the emergency. Digital voices from the territories

Related to the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-June 2020), some recent studies on the application of content analysis of geolocalized tweets (Bashar et alii 2020, Punziano et alii 2020) have demonstrated the negative relation between the Coronavirus spread (with Northern Italy most affected) and the polarity of social narratives about the pandemic. In brief, the "resilient" social narrative of the most impacted regions has corresponded to a negative and worried emergency narrative of the less affected regions. In relation to epidemiological data, the second phase of the pandemic (also referred to as the "second wave", in autumn 2020) has been very different from the first (ISSa 2020). The severity of emergency, without considering questions about the reliability of the first wave data (Istat 2020a), has been more relevant and homogeneous across Italy. The study questions whether there are differences between the geography of contagion and that of the narrative. Given the increasingly homogeneous spread of the virus, the assumption has been that the digital arena also has ended up showing a narrative more united on negative sentiments. The issue is addressed by analyzing a corpus of geolocalized tweets, extracted in the period from the new October lockdown to the partial and fragmented pre-Christmas reopenings in 2020. Following the application of a model combining text mining and GIS analysis, the most recurrent themes in social discourse on Twitter were mapped. This geography of emerging social narratives (COVID-Issues) compared with the geography of contagion spread (COVID- Spread) and the norms (COVID-Measures) allowed to detect the trend in the relationship of these three dimensions during the second emergence from COVID-19.