The course offers the knowledge of social communication as a process that characterizes a whole society and not only the activities aimed at the campaigns - functional and symbolic - of responsibility, awareness and social promotion. These, in fact, do not constitute a sector of communication either of public institutions (as required by law) or of private institutions for profit and not for profit. All operating communication is intrinsically social; even without having a vocation, it is social in its effects and consequences. Communication is a demanding process of relational attention: it is concretely realized only as a repeated choice of value for an extended ethical awareness of a whole social system. In particular, in a state of pluralist democracy (universal suffrage, secrecy and freedom of vote, periodic elections, pluripartitism, principle of tolerance of dissent) social communication is a fundamental process of feeding, transmission and protection of historical public values such as the general interest and the right to truth and completeness of information. It can intervene as a communication between the multiplicity of interests, ideas, values of social groups present in the country-system so that each has effectively guaranteed its existence, the possibility of free development and of being recognized by the general interest pursued.

Knowledge and ability to understand
At the end of the course, the student must know the social communication institutions of public relevance, then:
- the principles, values, rules that have civilized and civilized (or not civilized) social communication (system of communication rules);
- the conditions, the structures, the behaviors that have proven themselves and prove to be concordant (or non-concordant) with the aforementioned principles, values and rules (system of the action of the active communication);
- control over social communication (system of sanctions) in the sense of how, and if, guarantees communication as indispensable to society in order not to dismember itself and to connect itself as a general interest.

Autonomy of judgment
At the end of the course the student must be able to recognize social communication according to two meanings:
- as a complex of information flows that typically cross a contemporary society and that contribute to the emergence of a public sphere (or general interest);
- as a choice of value for every communication, based on the awareness and ethical interdependence of all the dimensions of a social system (institutional, political, economic, cultural, civil).

Communication skills
At the end of the course the student must know how to use the sociological language of communication.