Searching: Digital platforms and everyday life

Head: Vanni Codeluppi

Year 2018

The "Searching. Digital platforms and everyday life" project, promoted jointly by IULM University and Facility Live, is part of one of the most relevant research strands of the Humanities at a European level, namely that of the behaviour of contemporary users in digital platforms.

The "Searching" project, in particular, sets out to study digital platforms, focusing on the consumption practices that users implement in these digital environments. The research program wants to verify the hypothesis that searching represents the lowest common denominator of the daily experience of contemporary users and that it has become a real cultural model of the present. According to this interpretation, the search is retracing an evolutionary model superimposed on that already experienced by shopping, which from simple consumer practice has become a way of living, knowing and experiencing the modern city.

Through the sociological study of the search, the research team intends:

  1. To describe and understand the functioning mechanisms of the Platform Society, in which the search is both the unifying feature of the experience and the cultural model.
  2. Outline and analyze precise patterns of online consumption, which are equivalent to just as many patterns of use of digital platforms. In this way, it will be possible to typify the users of digital platforms or identify the different consumption identities that each user assumes, at various times, through the experiences allowed by digital.
The modelling of user behaviour through the study of consumer practices represents an important scientific innovation in the European sociological panorama and, at the same time, becomes an operational tool for economic players who intend to operate with awareness in the "platform society".