Subjects, voices, information: helplines in response to distress and the right to communication (1991)

Information becomes a privileged and fundamental element against segregation, since it tends, or should tend, towards the communicative process, the creation of a network within which to flow and exchange. But even the best network can have its blind spots, places where information does not reach or arrives in a very poor state. If we allow the image of the network-city to pass us by, or rather of a reality of infinite interconnected or potentially interconnected points, then it is necessary to take a look also at the places where information becomes swamped and acquires the slow and exasperating rhythm of the things that are announced but never happen.
The summer, with its changes in social rhythms and its fractures in the ordinary organisation of civil life, ruthlessly highlights the inadequacies of the system with regard to the weakest members of society. For them, daily life becomes even more difficult and often impossible.
The survey “Subjects, voices, information: helplines as a response to discomfort and the right to communication” is structured in six chapters, each of which is based on a sample survey.
Social and technological changes, due to the speed of the transformations taking place, seem to inhibit the absorption, the progressive appropriation of the intermediate stages, with the effect of saturating communication and information, making them alien, not accessible, uncritical.
In this context, the role of telecommunications becomes one of the reference points for assessing the degree of economic, cultural and civil development achieved by a society.
The problem we were facing was to understand, at different levels, the knowledge and the need for helplines by categories of citizens in disadvantaged conditions.
For this reason, the core of our work was represented by the disabled person and his/her family members, who were joined by a series of categories and subjects with different responsibilities and relational qualities.
Based on this assumption, we thought of a methodological approach based on “concentric circles”: at the centre, i.e. the first circle, there are the families with disabled people, immediately afterwards there are the associations and cooperatives working in the social field, USL managers, hospitals and private clinics, politicians, administrators, trade unionists, journalists, a sample of common people.