Blogscene in Italy
“The blog comes out to be a bin of knowledges and spontaneous energy within a process of horizontal disponibility to produce information (to publish): there is no longer a limited number distribution points distributing to a load of persons, but there is a load of persons distributing their own small contents to a restricted group, more adhering to the particular content.
New phenomenon of global communication” (…)
Certain blogs place themselves in a position of challenge to professional information, putting beside a kind of “homemade” information where everybody can be a potential reporter, already defined as the “diffused reporter”.
Today’s discussion in Italy is attached to the recognition of independence and liberty created by internet. The network offers us a more inclusive public life, more articulated and less subjected to the influence of institutional and economical authorities.
The ruling class missed to examine the reciprocity of causes and effects between digital technologies and innovation of contents.
The technocratic political elite is not longer able to follow the complex language of internet, undermining their authority and efficient in it’s variants of persuasion.
The network is a fertile soil for shifts in opinion participated by the population and allows an easy and convinced migration from the writing desk to the street.
The part Italian bloggers desire, is not the one of the “player” but they prefer to arbitrate the match, to guarantee respect of the rules. Unique exception is probably Beppe Grillo, a “fuoriclasse” (which stands for champion in italic soccer terms). Point of departure this, for the success of his shifts of opinion, starting for example from his very huge and super-visited website, unequalled creator of blog who managed to smash through the network of institutional information. Fact which brought him the tribute of front-pages and specials conduced by every single commentator present in the world of Italian tv. Seems that only Grillo is able today in Italy to create a stir, though he had been already nominated “EUROPEAN HERO 2005” by the Time. So the only “Italian hero” seems to be Beppe Grillo. Will he be the new phenomenon “Berlusconi” of the new-media, undermining the old lobbies of the mass-media?
Beppe Grillo, famous tv comic put away by Italian television …, after years of media isolation, decided to publish in the web his own personal blog, which allows him to go on launching his charges full of satirical provocation. The blog of Beppe Grillo handles the most various arguments, from national politics to ecology, passing by economies and globalization, with the intent to move the public opinion, searching in this the resolution. The aim has been fulfilled: the Beppe Grillo blog is the most clicked in Italy and enters in the first 30 most clicked blogs in the world.
150thousand contacts during the V-Day (Vaffa-day), iniziative which he organized launching it in the web though actuated in the squares of Italy getting concrete by collecting signatures for the dismissal from the Italian parliament of those deputies who had been sentenced in the past. Full success and hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Grillo comments: “A revolution of information” enabled by internet and spaces like the blogs. “A form of direct democracy…,…of knowledge and information alternative to traditional media”. “Future information is based on the reputation of who gives it to you”…”and that’s why politicians have problems opening an own blog!”.
This is the real power: technology and knowledge as a common heritage; an direct access user service. There is a battle in course for knowledge free from copy-right, royalities, patents and various other “brakes of conciousness”. The new frontier of communication in arrival could be defined in its “coming up from the bottom”. Active participation and pugnacious. Internet fills the squares. It’s able to break up the present system of representative government. The network is seen as a new “agora” since representative democracy doesn’t any longer represent anybody. It’s years that it sticks politicians to the failure of their promises.
The V-day revealed the birth of a new political space based on the conversation in internet through the use of blogs; also other Italian and international websites even much more ancient then the Grillo blog have been able to move a crowd towards strategic localities
(e.g. social network in occasion of the G8 as http://www.ecn.org/, http://italy.indymedia.org/ )
Though the question is much debated, this new area of public exchange offers the possibility that “the blog might be used in future also by a mainstream; but anyhow the blog itself remains a mainstream, with all its peculiarities and distortions. I don’t confide in mainstream information and my position doesn’t change if I come in contact with this kind of information through television news, a blog, a paper newspaper or whatever it could be. I know that mainstream information is for structural circumstances untrustworthy, due to its pattern and its research of the lowest common denominator between too different elements, but this is a long discussion. Mainstream information results to be imprecise, because organized at industrial level…
Coming back to Bomba, the Beppe Grillo blog is actually a mainstream like television, imprecise, national-popular, not to trust in.”
http://blog.stefanoepifani.it/
On the other hand: Grillo has been famous before opening the blog and so his case isn’t the countercheck of the possibility to start in Italy participated debates, as proposed here, from the bottom, from the network, but he has used in internet his previous success which he had gained through the traditional means of communication, and that’s why it was easy for him to involve other blogs. (can the network without a media strategy uphold a project?)
On the other hand: Grillo has been famous before opening the blog and so his case isn’t the countercheck of the possibility to start in Italy participated debates, as proposed here, from the bottom, from the network, but he has used in internet his previous success which he had gained through the traditional means of communication, and that’s why it was easy for him to involve other blogs. (can the network without a media strategy uphold a project?)
Looking at other aspects of communication within interactive platforms in Italy with a much less echo in the media but equally visited by the internet generation, we find:
Communities of individuals who recognize themselves in sharing the same system of values, of cultural interests. Important organizations of groups for conserving the discussion and the stigma of belonging to something, and avoiding somehow the drama of exchanging in internet, that means that your interlocutor is free to connect and disconnect as he likes: many for example music bands, regional and national, who created their own blog, most of them located in www.myspace.com/.
To consider also the purpose of territorial power, that means centralized communication, send and received by users physically nearby.
Among those the very popular forums of the Italian hooligans, http://www.tifonet.it/ , http://vivereultras.forumcommunity.net/.
Another system of transfer of ideas and proposals which is having a discrete success, is the "good practice", open discussions about actions in the ecological, political, social and cultural sphere, considering the physical, social and anthropological limits o development and trying to create alternative models, more plausible, more pacific, more respectful.
Present also a big number of personal blogs, single subjective diaries to narrate one’s own experiences and share them with old and new friends. Here the classic dimension of private is upset: under pseudonym it’s possible to hide the identity and personal reflections are published waiting for the external comment. And to conclude the chat, virtual rooms where persists the traditional model of approach (most of them male-female).
