Paideia Between Online and Offline: A Netnographic Research on Fan Fiction Communities

The sociological reflection on education cannot avoid a careful analysis of the op-portunities and new needs triggered by the digital turn and the overlapping of the online and offline plans of the experience in which young people are growing up. Starting from the need to understand what are the real competences and skills re-quired by the knowledge society, our paper illustrates the results of a netnographic analysis conducted on an Italian fan fiction community, Erika Fan Page. The anal-ysis has given the opportunity to observe the concrete communicative and relation-al practices and the progressive development of competences within an important learning community. The observation of these competences, which need to be im-plemented within the different socializing agencies, seems to be an important start-ing point to suggest a reflection upon the current educational challenges of the Ital-ian school - that sometimes seems to be still far from completely fulfilling the needs of the society and of the job market and from encouraging the development of a mature digital media literacy.