Rovigo, Italy, on April 1994
(A. Rossin, Chairman of the Conference)

The main assumption that has emerged from this Conference at Rovigo is that the effectiveness of communication is not function of only him who sends the message, but also of him who receives it. Communication is a function of the listener's flexibility.
This assumption bases itself on a combination of two variants. The first one concerns the message receiver's personality, that can be rigid dependent, or autonomous and flexible. The other one concerns the two different sides of communication: its own substance which is given by the cultural quality of the message that the speaker wants to send, and its own form, which is instead given by just a series of "context identifying signals". By wanting to point out some of them only, these"context signals" epitomise the authoritativeness and the rhetorical ability of the speaker, the prestige of the place where the message is delivered, the prominence which is given to the message on newspapers, the piercing power of the media used for its transmission. The 1994 Italian polls look as a resounding example of how such a particular aspect of this matter may have been influential.

I want once more to stress the paradoxal sides of this scenario of communication. Really, if a message were sent to an individual with a rigid personality, dependent on his social leaders, just their symbols and context signals must give to the message the indispensable authoritativeness to make it convincing and suitable. In this case there would be a matter of an one-way relation of hierarchical information, and not of the communication as understood with its most noble meaning of interactive, aware and fertile participation of man to collective culture.
Then, if a message possesses a good adherence with reality, its own authoritativeness would obtain the paradoxal effect of increasing its listeners' habit of being trustful, and therefore it is destined to confer some convincing power on who informs, even if he has no solid cultural target. Those who give information with an influential scientific content, but who neglect how to increase their listeners' consciousness, might unconsciously play the game of who also gives information but with a personal and demagogical aim, and who knows how to appear with great authoritativeness before the people, so being able to take advantage of the same hierarchical dependence that the first would have fixed in the listeners.
Thus a full cultural success of scientific information is a fixed function of the flexibility of who receives it. Only this condition seems able to give to the message a real communication value, i.e. that of an irreplaceable input to a critical and conscious share of the individuals in the increase of common cultural standard.

Starting on such bases, the Conference of Rovigo wanted to point out the cultural conditions of our society and the multimedial potentialities of modern information technology, on which the youth's brainframes building depends, with the faculty of trimming scientifically such building towards more elevated levels of flexibility and creativity. Particular attention has been paid to the formative function of family communication: in this 1994 International Year of the Family, and in the Italian Week of Science, the modern education research has finally stressed the cultural intruments able to allow the family, even before the school, to recover its own role of a load-bearing pillar of society, by a conscious and responsible running of the most important function of communication: the building of a thinking brain. So this Conference of Rovigo has shown its two souls.

Firstly, in a world which evolves more and more quickly, the need has plainly emerged of increasing the information technologies on more advanced cultural and scientific bases. Actually, if information might however exist, and if its delivery might necessarily go from the Up level of Science to the Down of mass basis, only a scientific running of information tools and contents could allow people to free themselves outside the tunnel of demagogy and consumism, therefore to continue on the way that Galileo taught us: that which starting from the knowledge of nature reaches the full respect of the nature's laws.

As a second soul of this Conference, it emerges overbearingly the need to equip the individual, that are our children, with a more open and creative - in a word more flexible - brain framework. After having stressed the family communication patterns which govern the brain organic structuring, it becomes finally possible to increase consciously and rationally flexibility and creativity in the new generations. Only in this way the information can become a true act of communication: really, only an autonomous and critical approach to information can allow the man in the street both to defend himself against the toxic effects that information can produce, and to share with his own creativity the building of society of tomorrow.

Therefore there are all the preliminary elements to allow both the souls of this Conference to integrate themselves in one act of communication, thus starting on a real scientific basis a European Policy of Creative Education. With these words the Conference of Rovigo had been opened, and with the same, that are a promise and a hope, it closes. Now the word passes to people of goodwill.

Antonio Rossin
(Chairman of the Conference)

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