The global and widespread immersion in the sea of multimedia communication represents a generalized and established reality. In this communicative sea, with increasing frequency, there is the impression that a "news story" is taken up and edited over and over again in a manner proportional to its tragic nature, with the effect of overshadowing the informational intent, to the sole benefit of "sensationalist" and "spectacular" aspects. Thus chasing the audience imperative - sometimes with the false naiveté of those who declare the right to information and transparency as absolutes that end up conflicting with personal, community and social rights - which ends up having the effect of a progressive loss of the ability to "participate" in the problems, suffering and often tragedies of others. Inevitable consequence is to engender a kind of "narcosis" of minds and consciences with respect to the pain represented. A pain that sometimes becomes gossip, when it is the performers themselves who make themselves the primates of a show in which they compete for the role of main protagonists in blows of interviews, pictures, and pseudo-scoops. The many egregious cases of recent years highlight the lability of the boundary between the right to information and media jackals, between participation and curiosity, between investigation and gossip. They pose, as well, pressing questions of an educational and ethical nature, at a time when they urge serious intervention in the management of multimedia communication precisely in order to avoid that emotional numbness that, little by little, weakens both the ability to "think" and the ability to "feel" the lives of others, as if media overexposure gradually makes one insensitive to tragic events or indifferent to the many broken lives that have different skin, language, faith, culture from one's own. Or, they are simply not us. In this issue we collect reflections on the issue of "spectacular communication" and on possible interventions of an educational and formative nature that can contribute to making the human dimension of communication visible, in a society that cannot escape the most accelerated and evolved forms of the latter but that, at the same time, must know how to govern it in function of the human and not "against" it.