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.