ICTS and the Human Body: A Social Representation Approach

Aim of the research was to monitor how new technologies - mainly the mobile and the internet - and the human body (as well as the Self) are considered, within a social representations approach. Nearly three hundred university students from different disciplinary fields answered a questionnaire aimed to detect the content (through free associations), the attitudes (through a semantic differential scale) and the structure (through correspondence analysis based on the free associations) of the representations. Results show that everyday thinking seems not to have integrated, at a conceptual level, the ongoing process of convergence between the human body and technologies. Along the detected dimensions, different groups take different positions, mainly as regards allocations, practices, and concerns with the human body