Web-Based Political Movements: The Example of Italy's Purple People

Gothenburg.
AoIR 2010 has started, and we’re beginning with Fabio Giglietto, on how networked publics are reconfiguring themselves these days. There is a shift in how we understand publics, as well as in how we understand civicness – from dutiful citizenship to self-actualising citizenship, where there is a lesser sense of obligation to government participation, and a more self-determined form of participation in civic matters. This is also wrapped up in participatory culture, and participatory politics as a subset of this.

Political engagement today exists at the intersection of political knowledge (information and communication based) and political participation, then. Fabio examined the anti-Berlusconi movement in Italy, looking in the first place at Google search patterns for the ‘No Berlusconi Day’ in late 2009 and ‘popolo viola’ (the purple people, referring to the colour adopted by the anti-Berlusconi movement). Some years before, too, there were two ‘Vaffanculo Days’ organised by Beppe Grillo, and these also generated significant search interest. Interestingly, at that time, there was substantially less mainstream media coverage of these events than there has been for more recent developments.

Fabio conducted some Gephi-based social network analysis of the Website network around these events; Facebook shows up as an important hub for online activity in these maps. There are hundreds of groups and pages for the purple people on Facebook, the majority of tem small in size, and Fabio conducted some further qualitative analysis of these groups both during the height of the ‘No Berlusconi Day’ period, and during a random period of no heightened activity.

The model used for this is a two-dimensional political activism (from affiliation to action) / shaped information (from representation/documentation to organisation) model. Representation (or documentation) of activities is the s trongest element here, especially during the key period of activity (where there are the most activities to document); affiliation is more important for the smaller groups, it appears.

The purple people are a truly Web-based movement, overall; they are not affiliated with major political parties or media interests, and self-representation is therefore a key factor. This is organised especially through Facebook, and social media provide traces of the evolution of this phenomenon. What will be interesting now is to compare these observations with different political movements.