Foucault, Goffmann and the poisoned gifts in New Media Studies

Ivo Stefano Germano and Giorgio Porcelli question whether a space for critical theory is still possible in the digital context. Which are the cultural and communicative limits of a possible hermeneutics of the new media studies? The problematic dimension of authors such as Goffman, Foucault, Godbout in relation to the enhancement of the gift in the networked society is addressed both as a declination of the logics of the transformative power of the converging platforms and as a cultural and communicative process that cannot be excluded. The gift as the coexistence of pre-technological symbolic artifacts is distinguished from the many (too many?) false gifts of the network.