| Abstract: | The article analyses social discourses about the Internet in Italy from the mid-1990s onwards, taking its examples from advertising. Beyond the individual campaigns and their subjects there have been two distinct trends in Internet advertising. The first has made an effort to build the Internet as a cognitive object, the second has presented the Internet as a 'possible world'. The article aims to account for the ways in which the Web has been thematized in Italy: its fields of reference, and how its possible social and personal uses have been anticipated. |
