“I’m my personal revolution.” Web 2.0, subjectivity and activism of the Purple Movement in Italy. - ENG

8/6/2019 Im my personal revolution. Web 2.0, subjectivity and activism of the Purple Movement in Italy. - ENG

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4E CONGRS DE LAFS-GRENOBLE,5 AU 8 JUILLET 2011

MOUVEMENTS SOCIAUX ET INNOVATIONS.NOUVELLES TECHNOLOGIES COMME ENJEU,NOUVELLES TECHNOLOGIES

COMME RPERTOIRE

Im my personal revolution. Web 2.0, subjectivity and activism of the

Purple Movementin Italy.

Emanuele Toscano ([email protected])

Researcher, University of Rome La Sapienza

Raffaele Pizzari ([email protected])

University of Rome LUMSA

Abstract

The purple movement was born on the day after the failure of the Lodo Alfano1

law in the

Constitutional Court, at the beginning of October 2009. An anonymous citizen hidden behind the

pseudonym of San Precario interpreting the rising sentiment of indignation of people against the

arrogant reaction of the Prime Minister when the law was declared inconstitutional, decided to

promote a big demonstration to ask for the dismissal of Silvio Berlusconi. The contacts on the

Facebook page that was created to organize the demonstration rose relentlessly. Local groups were

created all over, where people shared their competences and their time to create flyers, to sponsor

the demonstration with information points, to create forums, to share the travel with people coming

by car or to fill the coaches that would head towards Rome on the day of the demonstration.

This was the genesis of the first web auto-promoted demonstration, that brought one million

people to Rome, without the mediation of political parties, trade unions or associations. Simple

citizens met in San Giovanni square, autonomously organizing transport, logistics of the square and

speeches from the stage. A connective intelligence (De Kerckhove 1997) that connected through

the web to affirm rights from below and those who are more and more negated, above all.

The paper aims to analyse the purple movement, as it definitely sanctions the crisis of

representation thats been hitting political parties and trade unions during the last decades. These

public subjects look completely unable to respond to the challenges caused by the complex political,

social and cultural changes brought about by the third millennium. The crisis of representation

resides and is shown in the way this movement was born: through the Internet. The net is with allthe limitations connected to this definition an open, fluid, space, where the rules are self-determined

from the community willing to represent itself (i.e. the global community feeding Wikipedia, the free

and opened encyclopaedia).

Resum

Le mouvement "violet" en Italie est n au lendemain de l'chec de la loi Lodo Alfano devant la

Cour constitutionnelle, au dbut d'Octobre 2009. Un citoyen anonyme - cach derrire le

pseudonyme de San Precario en interprtant la monte de l'indignation contre la raction

1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodo_Alfano


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arrogante du Premire Ministre lorsque la loi a t dclare inconstitutionnelle, a dcid de

promouvoir une manifestation pour demander le renvoi de Silvio Berlusconi.

La premire manifestation auto-promue par le web a port un million de personnes Rome, sans

la mdiation des partis politiques, syndicats ou associations. Des simples citoyens se sont runis

San Giovanni en organisant de manire autonome les transports, la logistique de la place et les

discours de la scne. Une "intelligence connective" (De Kerckhove 1997) qui sest reli par le webpour affirmer les droits qui sont de plus en plus ni.

La communication prsente vise analyser le mouvement violet comme expression de la

crise de la reprsentation qui a frapp les partis politiques et les syndicats au cours des dernires

dcennies. La crise de la reprsentation politique classique rside et est reprsent dans la faon

dont ce mouvement est n: travers le web 2.0. Les social networks sont un espace ouvert et fluide,

o les rgles sont auto-dtermin par les communauts qui vent se auto-reprsenter niveau

politique et culturel.

---------------------------------------------

Introduction

On December the 5th 2009 a million people, ordinary citizens of all ages and from

different social backgrounds, have demonstrated in Rome asking the resignation of

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The particularity of the event lies in its

being convened and organized entirely through the tools available to the Web 2.0,

and through the social network site, Facebook above all. In order to characterize the

event, the organizers have chosen a color to represent them, a color that did not

pertain to any political party or pre-existing political movement: the purple.

Traditional media made the rest, following with interest the mount of the event anddefining the social and cultural reality emerged from the network, the web, as the

"purple people". The latter, in addition to the demonstration called "No Berlusconi

Day" of December 5, 2009, was involved in an intense political season, continuing

to organize both major national events and smaller local initiatives, continuing to be

present - albeit in much smaller terms- in the Italian cultural and political landscape.

Its clear that the No Berlusconi Day had a huge importance as it confirmed a new

way to conceive demonstration in Italy. More than one million person spontaneously

organized - both online and offline - even tought the lack of any party leadership.

Places of interaction provided by the Internet such as social networks, blogs and

wikis have brought the technological support that allowed each user to be part of thepurple wave, and this very peculiarity did not just create a clear border with the past,but even wrote the first page of a new way to think at protest in Italy.

The main character of this new chapter is an italian society described by the 44

Censis Report (Censis 2010: 235) as follows: Italian society seems pervaded by

widespread inertia an anthropology without history, without a positive outlook on

the future. We are looking at a society that is turning more and more into a mass

pulp, a chaotic hodgepodge of drives, emotions and experiences. A society as unable

to identify its goals as it is skeptical or indifferent vis--vis the future. Thus, Italians

are dangerously poised to experience the worst, in politics as well as in domestic

abuse; in urban micro-crime as in organized crime; in the spread of substance abuse

as in the weak integration of immigrants; in the inefficiency of bureaucracies as inwaste management; in the crossfire of vetoes that hinders the development of


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infrastructures as in the low quality of TV programs. So much so that the phrase

mass pulp could be replaced by the more scathing term mush an ineffectual set

of individual elements and personal bits held together by some superficial socialdimension.

A drawing, that shown by the Censis, where the opportunities of participation

provided by the Web assume value beyond any price.The paper aims to analyze origins, discourses, practices and composition of the

purple movement, considering it as an example of movement born in the new

millennium in Italy. The paper also aims to show how these movements attest the

crisis of classical representation expressed by political parties and trade unions,

historical actors of social conflict of the twentieth century. Crisis mainly due to the

standing out of individuals and subjects' centrality and their needs for affirmation

and self construction, supported by new communication technologies and in

particular social networks of Web 2.0, able to influence the forms of representation

and mobilization. Wieviorka (2007a, 2007b) stresses that the political representation

crisis is due to four main aspects. We hereby focus on three of them, which better

reflect the situation in Italy during the Berlusconis governements.

The first is asocial crisis: the politicians fail to provide satisfactory responses and

increased social inequality, social exclusion and insecurity; collective problems are

not the most debated and addressed in the interests of social solidarity, and political

parties and intermediate institutions (such as trade unions) lose reliability.

The second is an institutional crisis: the institutions seem to be inadequate to

answer questions raised by the social contexts in which the individual dimension is

more and more crucial, since they are expected not only a response to collective

needs, but also answers that go facing the subjectivity of individuals. This, according

to Wieviorka (2007a) explains - in part - the growing importance of institutions like

the Constitutional Court, and, more generally, the shift of power from political to

judicial institutions, which take advantage in terms of credibility and representation.

Judicial institutions which, because of it, are being targeted by the polical actions of

the Prime Minister Berlusconi, with the specific aims to reduce their influence and,

above all, their independence.

The third is a crisis linked to the raise of the centrality of individuals' autonomy

and their choices, that are difficult to be intercepted and represented by political

parties, due to their nature and genesis to represent large aggregates of people.Cultural issues such as living wills, euthanasia, freedom of worship, civil rights,

imply a difficulty by the political parties in formulating responses and solutions. The

solutions proposed remain collective and don't go in the direction of an increasing

autonomy for the individuals, that are more and more aware of their freedom of

choice.

To these various manifestations of the crisis of political representation it has to

been added another element, particularly important in Italy: the very high average


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age of the ruling class and politics2, often unable to grasp the dynamics of changes

across the country and incapable of dealing with them.

From a methodological point of view, the article here presented is based on a

process of analysis of statistical data from the different Facebook pages used by the purple movement, as well as participant observation carried out during the

organization of the No Berlusconi Day event. In addiction, many formal and

informal interviews were made with participants and organizers. The Facebook

pages analyzed are essentially two: the first, used until December 5, to coordinate

and collect subscriptions in the event of No Berlusconi Day, and the other one

created a couple of days after the huge demonstration3, the purple mouvement, that

is still active and has reached 415,000 subscriptions. The period of observation and

collection of statistics relating on two Facebook pages is between October 9 th, 2009

and December 6th, 2009 for the first ("a national demonstration to demand the

resignation of Berlusconi") and from 7 December 2009 to February 27 2010 for

the second (the "purple people"). We chose this dates because on the 27 th of

February the purple movement organised another national demonstration, which

registered the participation of more than eighty thousand people.

Finally, due to the peculiar nature of the purple movement, it has been attempted

to use methods and observation techniques on on-line cultures4, therefore conducting

an online netnography. Pierre Levy (2001: xvi) defines cyberculture as "the set of

technologies (material and intellectual), practices, attitudes, thought patterns and

values that have developed with the growth of cyberspace. The cyberculture can bedefined, taking the four-repartition proposed by Malek (2005), through a futuristic

utopian and technocratic perspective; as a symbolic code of the new society

(informational perspective); as a set of cultural practices and lifestyles associated

advent of information technologies of the Web (anthropological perspective); or as

the term that reflects the social changes made by access to new media

(epistemological perspective).

With the word netnography Kozinets (2010: 8) shows an approach to online

research that examines the interactions of individuals derived from the interaction on

the Web or through computer-mediated communication; an approach based on an

adaptation of the classic ethnography of participant observation (Kozintes 2006:

135). In the particular case of this research a blended approach has been used: we

therefore combined participant observation and interviews based on face to face

2The average age of the XVI parliamentary term is 53.3 years, and the Council of Presidents of the

past fifteen years has been equal to 62 years. Out of a total of 630 members only one person has less

than thirty years and only forty-seven less than forty (8% of the total). Since the minimum age for

election to the Senate is just 40 years, this means that in both Houses of Parliament MPs under the age

of 40 - 46% of the Italian population - are less than 5%. (Rosina, Balduzzi 2008).3https://www.facebook.com/popviola

4The social science literature regarding the definitions and interpretations of the concept of online

culture orcyberculture is now immense, and it is impossible to bring it back here.


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interaction together with the observation of virtual communities. The main fieldwork

was Facebook fanpages, but we also analyzed forums, YouTube channels, blogs and

mailing lists. We tried to integrate the two research fields, the virtual and the real

one, in order to consider netnography (the study and the development of qualitative

and quantitative data collected online) only as a part - albeit important - of theresearch. We considered the purple movement also as a virtual community, as

defined by Rheingold (1993: 3), as a social aggregation that emerges from the

network involving a sufficiently large number of individuals with an adequate

number of stable correlations in cyberspace.

Berlusconi resigns!

The purple movement in Italy is an unusual case in the landscape of social,

political and cultural mobilisations5, for its constitutional traits: 1) the organization

through the Internet and social network platform, Facebook in particular, 2) absence

of organized collective structures (associations, political parties, trade unions) in

convening and managing the event, which have been replaced by ordinary citizens

motivated by individual thrust of opposition and resistance to a domain (Touraine

2005) identified with the policies of Berlusconi Government and the Prime Minister

figure, 3) the insistence on the cultural dimension of the action, represented by the

demand for more rights and protection of those rights who are under attack, and

proposition of a political, social and cultural model focused on freedom, solidarity,

recognition of the others, on the ethical dimension of respect and of affection. Not

surprisingly, interventions that have followed from the stage, completely organized by the demonstrators themselves, were based on five main thematic axes, which

represented those aspects most challenged by the cultural model "Berlusconi":

legality and justice, information, labor policies, rights of citizenship, education and

research, 4) a massive presence of young people, partially due to the instrument

used, the social network.

These traits will be present in the mobilization of the Maghreb countries (Tunisia

and Egypt) and in those of Spanish indignados that - with some differences - were

characterized by the presence of many young people, by the organization across

social network platforms (facebook, twitter, blogs, online radio), the demand for

greater democracy, the absence of classics organized structures such as political

parties, associations and unions.

The history of the purple movement begins in October the 9 th, 2009, the day the

Constitutional Court rejected - considering it unconstitutional - the Lodo Alfano, law

5Some sporadic cases of events organized through social networks had already occurred. For example,

in Colombia, in 2008, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets against the FARC

(Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia), organized through the Facebook page "One Million

Voices Against FARC".


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124/2008 (the "Provisions on the suspension of criminal proceedings against senior

state"). The law provided for the suspension of any penal measure against the four

highest offices of state6, and then found to violate article 3 (principle of equality of

all citizens before the law) and 138 (procedure for review for approval of the

Constitution and constitutional laws) of the Italian Constitution.The same day an anonymous user, hiding himself behind the pseudonym of San

Precario7, created a Facebook fanpage that launched a "national demonstration to

demand the resignation of Berlusconi". The growth of virtual membership was

exponential, and within a few weeks the fanpage reached more than 350,000

members.

Fig. 1 Fanpage subscription A national mobilisation

(Source: Facebook Insight, our elaboration)

The Facebook page was transformed into a "Digital Agora," in which many

people talked about how to organize the event: the cooperative work brought in a

short time to create an identity logo, flyers, posters. Local groups were formed in

many cities, both in Italy and abroad8, organizing banquets information, distributing

6The President of the Republic, the President of the Senat, the President of the Chamber of Deputies

and the Prime Minister.7San Precario is a collective icon that appears for the first time in 2004 during the MayDay in Milan.

MayDay is a demonstration that parades the First of May through the streets of many European cities

to claim the rights of precarious workers. The collective soul of this icon is very rooted in the circuits

of social centers and Italian and European globalization movement, and starred in the course of many

years of protest action against precarious (Farro, Toscano 2006). While declaring from the beginning

of the event outside the organization, the collective has not opposed the use of the icon of San Precario

"by this anonimous user, because it was judged in tune with the spirit underlying the collective figure

of the icon.8

Over one hundred local groups in Italy and thirty-eight groups abroad are founded: Italian

immigrants citizens organized events in Monaco, Paris, New York, London, San Francisco, Barcelona,

with a participation, as in the case of London and Paris, of over a thousand people.


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leaflets, information about how to lead the event. Flash mobs 9 were organised,

money collections were made and adhesions to fill buses to Rome were collected

(they were, in the end, more than 300). Only in Rome, in a month, a dozen tents

information were organized and over 30,000 flyers10

were printed and distributed

through networks of contacts that each participant provided. The strength and spreadof this widespread popular participation throughout the country is evidenced by this

consideration made by a purple activist a few days before the event:

... We were distributing leaflets in Frascati, (small town near Rome) and a tourist

told me that the same flyer was given to him a few days before, when he was on a

visit to Trento (over 600 km away, nda).

The fact that people that didn't know eachother distributed the same leaflet in

distant places of the country, and the fact that the same leaflet was collectively

created and downloaded from a Facebook page, shows the novelty of the purple

movement. The practices of movement itself were characterized by a speed and

immediacy of communication that resided in the popular initiative. It is possible to

bring these practices to anthropologist Pierre Levy's concept ofcollective

intelligence (1996:34-38). The latter is defined as a universally diffused intelligence,

and therefore it is not held by a utopian omniscient power center, but constantly

enhanced and coordinated in real time using information technology and

communication. This collective intelligence leads to effective mobilization of skills,

recognized and valued in their diversity and specificity. The realization of the

demonstration on the 5th

of December and the awakening of civil societyparticipation around the respect for and defense of democratic principles of freedom,

equality and solidarity was possible through the enhancement of knowledge and

skills of each individual who joined the movement. What happened on the 5th

of

december, as Levy argues (1996), was the activation of a collective intelligence that

was based on a subjective involvement, based itself on the recognition and

enrichment of individuals rather than a merely fetishized communitarian worship in

the opposition to Berlusconi.

The purple movement: its genesis, its reasons.

The analysis of the data that Facebook has provided for the pages created on the

platform, returns a picture of the movement consisting mainly of young people of

thirty-five years (as we shall see they are also part of the user population of social

networks in Italy). Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 show how both the page "A national

demonstration to demand the resignation of Berlusconi" and "The Purple People" are

9The flash mob is an impromptu and speedy action, organized through the network, which brings

together a number of people at a predefined location to conduct individual action - often unusual - and

repeated coordinated among the participants.10

Not to mention the unknown number of flyers printed at home by people and distributed to

letterboxes in their building or neighborhood.


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popular among 70% of young men and women - equally distributed - under the age

of 35 years.

Fig.2 Age and gender distribution fanpage subscribers "A national

demonstration..."


Fig.3 -Age and gender distribution fanpage subscribers "the purple people"


The majority of people who participated in the purple movement, young people

under thirty-five, are also those who perceived, to a greater extent, the domain of the


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cultural and political model imposed by Berlusconi for over sixteen years now. The

choice of voting - for the thirty-year-old of today - has always been between

Berlusconi and, on the other side, a large and confused mixture of those who

opposed him. The political scenario for twenty-year-old of today, by contrast, was

dominated by the figure of our Prime Minister since their teens. The criticism movedto Berlusconi, who have pushed many young people to demonstrate in the streets and

personally engage in the purple movement, are about to have its roots as a model of

a specific cultural and social fabric, made of carelessness, mediocrity, cunning,

contempt for the other, which he then helped to fuel with his government and his

political and personal choises. Berlusconi is acknowledged to have done just that

feeling of the performer of late modernity, in which the individual dimension has

fully established itself on the collective systems, declining, however, in a vulgar and

unrestrained individualism, which, according to the model proposed by Dubet

(1994), the strategic logic of self-assertion had the better of the subjectivizing. An

exaggerated individualism which triumphs conformism itself based on a

breakthrough that produces nothing, since it rests on nothing (Bauman 2006).

Berlusconi is accused by the young activists of the movement purple having dug

deeply in his heart and bowels of the Italian people, highlighting the darker aspects

and narrow-minded, customs clearance, and riding the success of this operation. A

kind of upside-down Liberation: while in the past an idea of social redemption, of

respect and recognition, of a more fair society triumphed, in the Berlusconian Italy

what rules, almost unchallenged, is the greed of television programming of his TV

networks. These networks are used as weapon of mass distraction while the Welfare

State is dismantled, the assertion of individual rights is obstacled and the expressionof dissent is either cancelled if not severely repressed, while the political discourse is

denigred.

These considerations can be found in the call to participate to the No Berlusconi

Day demonstration:

We dont know what will happen if Berlusconi finally resigns. And we believe that

the false fair play of some of our opponents simply demonstrates a cowards

attitude to our democracy and theyll have to in any case, answer for it to the voters.

What we know for sure, is that Berlusconi is a very serious and dangerous anomaly

in the framework of western democracy as reinforced of late by the the

international press that defines our government a dictatorship. We also know that

he understands his political situation so well, that he constantly works to change

laws and the Constitution for is own personal benefit. We can no longer aquiesce

when confronted by the actions of a man who has taken our Country hostage fro

more than 15 years and whose conception of the State and his position in it makes

him hostile to every freedom of expression, as demonstrated by his recent attacks

against the free press, satirists and the internet. We can no longer stay quiet when

faced with theunscrupulousness of a man for whom the shadows of his recent past

weigh heavily: his connections to the Mafia; his relations with members of the Mafia


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like Vittorio Mangano11

or Marcello Dell Utri12 , who has been found guilty of tax

fraud, false accounting, and complicity in conspiracy with the Sicilian Mafia.

He must resign and defend himself, just like every other citizen, in front of the

Law.

Berlusconi's Italy is perceived by activists of the purple movement as a country

locked in an eternal present (Toscano 2010), in the here and now that crystallized the

figure of Berlusconi and his political model and cultural turning as the only possible

alternative, investing the role of prophet master everything works out, who watches

over the Italians and that doing so would cure the collective interests as he does with

his own. Berlusconis recipes proposed/imposed meet the social expectations of

lower classes, the political expectations of conservative post-middle-class, and the

economical expectations of large financial groups.

Moreover, the critique directed to Berlusconi concerns his imposition of an idea

of eternal present, that is embodied in the narcissistic self-worship, built on the

negation of aging and its idea of eternal youth. Lasch, in his famous text of 1979 -

which anticipates the analysis of the phenomena that Italy is facing today- defines

the narcissist as someone who hides in the cult of the Self, manipulating the

emotions of other people as instruments of their own gratification and - at the same

time he constantly needs their approval and adoration.

The born of a new 2.0 public opinion

The purple movement is an expression of public opinion 2.0, able to find on theweb and social networking tools through a public space for discussion and debate,

skilled in increasing its potential and place it in the real world. The strength of the

movement purple on the web has been to overcome the danger of perfect filtering

(Sunstein 2002) that self-selection to your network with like-minded people,

excluding the discordant voices. Many people, who had previously been

Berlusconis elector disappointed by his politics decided to attend the

demonstration, and in some cases ecen actively participating to its organisation.

It is possible to identify two axes of purple movement in connection with the use

of the Web.

The first axis is part of the trend toward political popularization, cultural codes

and the use of imaginary pop to convey political messages, according to the idea of

politainment, i.e. the inclusion of political issues in the products of pop culture (Van

Zoonen 2005; Mazzoleni, Sfardini 2009). For example, many videos were produced

by activists and distributed through YouTube, which encouraged people to

11Vittorio Mangano, horseman in the Berlusconi Manor House in Arcore, has been a criminal killer

considered by the judge Salvatore Borsellino (killed by the mafia in 1992) the bridge between the

Mafia in Sicily and the North of Italy.12

Member of the Senat of the Republic and close friend of Silvio Berlusconi since the Seventies. Co-founder with Berlusconi of Forza Italia Party, he has been judged guilty of external paticipation in

mafia association.


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participate in the demonstration of the 5th of December. These videos used the

imagery of "V for Vendetta"13, or several musical parodies made by a Sicilian

precarious guy, who opened a successful YouTube channel14

(over 3,800,000

views).

The second axis is related to the use of new communication tools provided by the

Web and the new technology, which allow to act directly on the message conveyed,

and on the audience reducing interference and distortions, common for traditional

media. More than talking about audience - in fact - the Web 2.0 (social networks in

particular) enables processes of disintermediation in order for us to to speak about

parlance.Parlance emphasizes the active role of social actors in building the sense

that they have within the network (Maistrello 2007). The shift from audience to

parlance is showed by the number and type of interactions that have developed, for

example, on the Facebook page of "The Purple People", as shown in Table 1. Each

post placed on the page, in the observation period (7 December 2009 - February 27,2010) has recorded an average of 1198 interactions per day (likes, comments and

views), and users have posted on the page bulletin board an average of 692 posts per

day, for a total of 57456 messages in the observation period.

Tab.1 Fanpage interaction "the purple people"

Total Media Min. Max.

Comments 51494 620 122 3102

Likes 470730 5671 1421 20437

Dashboard messages 57456 692 0 5100Total interactions 579680 6984 1682 25362


In more specific terms this participation has been possible also by the changes

made by developers of social network site Facebook in the management of fanpages,

which become dynamic since March 2009. This means that radically change their

structure, moving from being similar to a web page (with contents unidirectional

top-down, so each user to get information he had to log in to), to resemble more to a

mailing list, which changes and news posted by the operators of the page come

directly on the notice boards of subscribers. This greatly increases the dynamism of

communication and interaction between the page and users and between users

themselves. This technical amendment by the developers of Facebook has allowed,

over time, the emergence of many genuine online newsrooms, with specific editorial

policies that act as aggregators of news and multipliers.

13The graphic novel by the English illustrator Alan Moore, which later became a movie in 2005,

rewrote in a modern way (it's set in a futuristic London run by an authoritarian and oppressive

government) the adventures of Guy Fawkes and the failed assault to the English Parliament in 1605,

remembered as the Gunpowder Plot. The video-inspired appeal to the main character of the film canbe visited here: http://youtu.be/2TRXuIttX0g 14

http://www.youtube.com/user/tonytroja?blend=1&ob=5


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Manuel Castells (2009) says as the recent innovations in the web called Web 2.0

and Web 3.0, thanks to devices and applications that fostered the expansion of social

spaces on the Internet, are fundamental to the radical transformation of society in its

network (Castells 1996) of communication mechanisms. The Internet has allowedthe affirmation of what the same Castells (2009: 60) defines mass self-

communication: a communication that has the potential to reach a global audience,

and therefore mass, but at the same time as auto-communication self-generated,

whose recipients are self-identified with a self-selection of content to be conveyed.

By endorsing this new form of communication, the Internet users build personal

systems of mass communication that rely on blogs, websites, audio and video

information flows, social spaces on the web, wiki, by processing the content based

on their orientation individual and at the same time fit in with a many-to-many.

These new tools of mass self-communication to provide social and cultural

movements of the third millennium and organizational forms of communication far

more effective and decisive, scoring a final tear with their own forms of organization

of political parties, trade unions, traditional associations. Although, as we are

reminded Castells (2007), even these social actors are still moving towards a kind of

communication more and more online. The Web offers the potential for circulation

of information related to the creation of virtual social spaces15 where debate and

discussion, to reach an increasing number of people 16 . Besides the self-mass

communication, it is important to remember the concept ofnetworked individualism,

which Castells recovers from Barry Wellman (1979), and which describes the

individualized report from the company as a specific form of contemporary social. Inthis process of individualisation of social relations is read the deployment of

communication network technologies support and nurture. The possibility of a

"personal mass" connection is the technological response to the contemporary

management, and autonomous individual, the social network chosen, even spatially

dispersed (Marinelli 2004).

The theme of the use of media by the social and cultural movements of the third

millennium is discussed and debated in an extensive literature, especially with

respect to the alterglobalization movement (Downing, 2001; Koopmans 2004; Farro,

Toscano 2006; Pasquinelli 2002; Bennet, Lance 2003, Bennet et al. 2004; Pickard

15Boccia Artieri parla, in riferimento alle interazioni sugli ambienti digitali, ed in particolar modo

riguardo ai Social Network, di semantica curata: le conversazioni sui SNS (persistenti, ricercabili,

duplicabili, scalabili) sono potenzialmente pronte a diventare una semantica curata, ad innovare dal

basso le dinamiche della sfera pubblica, pi delle conversazioni orali nei caff novecenteschi, che si

trasformavano in semantica curata solo attraverso la mediazione dei quotidiani e dei libri (Boccia

Artieri 2009).16

An article reported by Castells (2009) refers to a survey conducted by Technorati

(www.technorati.com) on the number of blogs on the Internet globally. As of November 2008 were

112.8 million blogs surveyed, with more than 250 million items of social media. The extent of this

phenomenon is given by comparison with 2004 data, in which there were only 4 million blogs. On

average are about 120,000 blogs created every day, 1.5 million articles published and updated some 60

million blogs (Baker 2008).


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2006) or more generally the use of social networks as a platform for political action

(Baumgartner and Morris 2010; Iannelli 2011; McClurg 2003, Moscow 2009).

Towards the Social Media

The new way of conceiving the Net, as a tool and an instrument of collective anddemocratic participation to ones country life, is based upon an increasingly

consciousness that the future of human society is inextricably bound to the future of

the Web (Hendler et al. 2008: 69). Internet radically changed peoples daily lfie: it

not only introduced a new way of doing things but also brought an entire univers of

things to do, and its this very element creating discontinuity with the past.

Each innovation of the Web will cause a reaction in the userc and viceversa, and

thats why the traces of cyber-activism have to be researched both in the

technological innovation and in the multitude ot the way to use them; in other words

both in the instruments availabla and in the maturity of the users.

Taken in account this observations, we try to answer the question Who where the

Web users of NBD? using the data obdained from a market survey done in 2009 by

the Permanent Observatory on Digital Content17.

Digital Divide

The survey divides users in three main categories based on their skill levelsand usage of the Internet: heavy, light and no users. Users are divided

as follows:

No-users": mainly individuals over 55 years old, low education and salary.Housewives and pensioners, South of Italy residents.

Light-users: mainly individuals up to 54 years old, medium-low educationand salary. Employees, workers, traders.

Heavy-users: mainly individuals up to 44 years old, medium-higheducation and salary. Officers, managers, directors or students.

The reading of the first two charts, suggests several considerations:

1. light users are decreasing in favor of heavy user, creating a clear divisionbetween the two extremes: heavy and no users;

2. Internets users are very reluctant to be turned into no-user and vice versa;then, a big slice of people is cut off from that culture exclusively conveyed

through the Internet;

3. students is an high-risk category considering labour market, future andsocial security, but they have access to a very powerful resource;

4. users distribution by age and sex is quite similar for men and women, 20 to45 years old;

17www.osservatoriocontenutidigitali.it


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Fig.4 Digital Divide in Italy

(Source: Osservatorio Permanente sui Contenuti Digitali )


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Fig.6 Content and communication on the net, trend 2007-2009


Filesharing Websites (e.g. Youtube), Wikis and Chats too are growing

significantly. Therefore, we can say that 2009 was the year of sharing, of collective

knowledge and social-news flow (e.g. Facebook wall). Meanwhile, Online

Newspapers had setback, although they equally cover an important role.

The chart n. 4 shows the sharing trend: 32% of the users interacts with the others

via the Web. 4% more than previous year, where interaction means actively

participating into discussions, adding content like comments, musical or audio-visual

files, pictures.


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Fig.7 Who interacts on the Internet, trend 2008-2009


In the light of this chart, we can deduce the nature of many users before No

Berlusconi Day:

they use social networks to communicate with a circle of virtual friendsand probably out of curiosity, since it is a growing phenomenon;

they are informed by the newspapers on the net but for further details alsouse Wiki-based website;

they use filesharing websites like Youtube for several reasons(entertainment, knowledge, ecc.);

they make extensive use of search engines; they have an increasing interest in blogs and forums; more than 3 out of 10 users actively interact with the Internet;

These seems to be ideal conditions for the humus that generated the purple

movement.

Culture and Technology

In a Cartesian graph which has Technology on the horizontal axis and

Culture on the vertical axis, are described:

o TV People: TV mass consumption and low cultural fruition;


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o traditionalist: moderate cultural fruition and use of traditionaltechnologies;

o sophisticated: strong cultural consumption and moderate traditionaltechnology;

oeclectics: strong disposition towards new technologies and firminclination towards consumption of cultural and entertainment

content, PC and Web oriented;

o technofan: highly technological, devoted primarily to an exclusiveplayful use of new technologies.

Fig.8 Cluster 2009


First we can see a barycentre shift: less culture and more technology from

2007 to 2009. The traditional matrix (sophisticated, traditionalist and TV people)

is gradually losing points instead of technological avant-guarde, which remains

outnumbered.

An efficient influence model

The NBD Facebook pages main goal has been the organization of a national

demonstration to demand the Mr. Berlusconis resignation, and it was


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immediately clear to everyone. To participate, a user must become a fan and

share the page as possible: simple target, clear procedure, little effort, return of

extreme emotional involvement. But above all, it responded to a collective need:

Mr. Berlusconi out of government.

Every initiative to achieve the goal it was left to the users resourcefulnessand earned credit by public acclamation on the Wall, that received and offered

food for thought, action opportunities and aggregation tools. The Wall became the

daily agenda, also for the media.

Major influencers and activists often required very simple tasks: clicks, flyers,

text messages, flash mobs, showing avatar, and things like that. Anyone could be

an activist without a radical change of lifestyle.

To claim that these are the only ingredients that made the NBD such a large

scale success is very hard, because the amount of interactions and actions made

on the Web is huge ed not totally verifiable; even tought we may affirm with

relative certainty that the spontaneity, the condivision, the simplicity, the

relatively small material effort, the clarity of intent, the popular acclamation and

the daily presence have been distinctive elements.

Is to be noted that, in fact, the influence model spontaneously created in the

purple movement is in armony with what proposed by Heiderich (Influence on

The Internet 2009)18, who propose a series of suggestions for the development of

a strategy to use the web to convey a specific idea about a given argument as:

controlling the agenda, calling in, attracting peoples attention, summerizing,

legitimazing, infering, giving some credit, facilitating, let it go. Each one of these

activities, as we have seen, were very present in the months before the NBD.The heterogeneous, chaotic and fluid structure of the Web may let someone to

believe of the inefficacy of any attempt to influence it. But [..] reality however

seems to demonstrate the opposite and to have confirmation of that its enought to

see where, in the awful (of awesome) chaos of the Internet, strange phenomenon

of attraction have happened, as in the Google case, appeared when the game

seemd to be mostly about search engines. Or in the Facebook case. Or, again, in

the case of the frenzy around the web 2.0 concept. Thus its possible to use the

Internet to exert influence and this happens trought different steps associated to

specific principle. (Heiderich 2009).

La politica contro la rete

The regulatory framework that rules the usage of the Internet in Italy is a

controversial matter and object of debate. The maturity of the Web during the last

ten years grew up considerably and the same timeframe war basically caracterized

by Berlusconi governments, namely governments of the owner of Mediaset

television group and the most influent politician over the managment of the public

television (RAI).

18D. Heiderich, 2009, Influence on The Internet, lObservatoire Publi par lObservatoire International

des Crises.


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In this context its clear that the development of the Internet undermines the

mediatic hegemony characterized by the televisions and the press, and this issue is

also related to the polemics about the conflict of interests, very harsh in Italy.

Berlusconis government credibility about the logic used to legislate on the

Internet received a violent hit when Wikileaks

19

published the cablegram

20

about theRomani decree

21: given what reported, the USA embassador considered the decree a

system to favor Mediaset over his competitor and a dangerous record for countries

like China that could justify their attacks towards the freedom of expression.

Apart from these considerations, in Italy the last ten years of parliamentary work

didnt promote the spread of the Web. Its enough to think about the attempt to

equalize websites to national newspaper (DDL Intercettazioni22) and Web streaming

to traditional television channels (Decreto Romani);23 its also possible to think about

the obstacles created by the Pisanu decree and by ddl Carlucci that in practice force

who sullies a public hot spot to whithstand expensive practice to gather and conserve

personal and traffic data of the users.

A hallmark of the Internet is its ability to comactly respond to repressions or

simply to external obstacles that can stop the development. This is demonstrated by

the initiative promoted by "Diritto alla Rete"24 (July 14, 2009), or a bloggers strike

against: the every day political will to crush the Net as a free sharing tool of

information and knowledge. 25

19WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret,and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website,

launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organization, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million

documents within a year of its launch. WikiLeaks describes its founders as a mix of Chinese

dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States,

Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is

generally described as its director. The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki (hence its

name), but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer

accepts either user comments or edits. (Source: Wikipedia)20

Wikileaks cablegram published by Repubblica.it, http://racconta.repubblica.it/wikileaks-

cablegate/dettaglio.php?id=10ROME125&ref=HRER1-121

Implements an EU directive that looks toward the harmony of the digital contentmarket,

affectingtheproductionofonlineaudioandvideo,thecopyright,thedefamationandtheISPs

role.Inafirstdraftitseemedtointroduceacompulsoryregistrationforproducersofvideoand

livevideoonthewebevenifamateur.Thefinaltext,evennotbeingclearaboutthedifference

between internet and tv content, excludes from this formal obbligations blogs and online

newspaperthatpublicvideoforaninformativepurpose.(fonteApogeonline) 22

Disegno di legge C.1415 (Ddl intercettazioni)23

Schema di decreto legislativo recante attuazione della direttiva 2007/65/CE24http://dirittoallarete.ning.com/

25http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV15Mgg6t7Q


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Documents

“I’m my personal revolution.” Web 2.0, subjectivity and activism of the Purple Movement in Italy. - ENG