This sentence was part of a speech on free expression delivered by Facebook founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg (2019) in front of students at Georgetown University in October 2019. It captures very effectively the tension generated by two vectors of change, pushing in opposite directions. One vector gives people âvoiceâ, by distributing digital interfaces to communicate and receive information. The other vector brings people under the technological domain of Internet platforms. Both vectors are powerful forces of change, which beginning in the 2000s contributed to transform society and the economy, people and their way to be political.
This book is about the community that emerged from an online crowd because of the political activism of a blog, the Blog of Beppe Grillo. This community embraced self-expressivity while rejecting the political establishment. It was fuelled by a profound sentiment of distrust towards the institutions of representative democracies and a belief in the necessity of shifting political power back to citizensâwhere, accordingly, it belongsâas online antidote against widespread political decay. The Internet empowered and defined the identity of a political community of citizens but also of users of unprecedentedly powerful digital interfaces. And yet the contradiction of the two vectors of change pushing in opposing directions is also the contradiction of this political community and possibly of all Internet-empowered political communities: to a decentralisation of power through the mass distribution of user interfaces corresponds an extreme centralisation of power into the hands of the designers and administrators who control the platforms used to coordinate the relations among users.
So, which vector would eventually determine who controls this and any other community emerging from the crowd? This book does not provide an answer (although if cornered the answer is likely going to be the social scientistâs most popular answer: âit dependsâŠâ). It wants instead to demonstrate the relevance of the question because indeed both answers are technologically possible.
Why Italy, Why the M5S
The last twenty years have seen in Italy the acceleration in the diffusion of the Internet access towards saturation levels in parallel with an exceptional growth of resentment against political institutions. Together with a sense of empowerment derived from the control of sophisticated communication and information technologies, which are designed to place the user at the centre, citizens developed a sense of political disempowerment derived from the perception of a dysfunctional system, incapable of delivering because it was corrupted by inefficiencies and (at worst) particular interests. The identity of the movement that became the M5 was shaped byâand would be unimaginable withoutâthese twin sentiments that crystallised in the figure of the citizen user . Technological empowerment fostered the self-confidence of citizens who gained the perception of being able to access via the Internet unlimited sources of information and knowledge. Political institutions, which had worked to reinforce legitimacy by projecting their expertise and monopolistic access to technical information and knowledge, were seen as delegitimised not only because of their poor standards of behaviour but also because they were replaceable in their functions by citizens who could tap into the expertise and knowledge available online to produce fair and wise policy solutions. If these trends are emerging or becoming consolidated in multiple political systemsâdemocratic and authoritarianâand sometimes contributing to the emergence of new political actors, it is in Italy, with the M5S, that they have shown their full potential by shaking the foundations of political institutions and representative democracy.
Political Participation
This book adds to the rich field of political participation, and more specifically Internet-enabled participation, by providing a detailed and longitudinal description of a movement that, at least in a first analysis, seemed to have converted into practice all the most optimistic arguments about the political disruptiveness of the Internet. Referencing two of the most popular works (and most optimistic in terms of the userâs empowerment) on the social effects of the Internet, these are the most stunning features apparently displayed by the Movement: its capacity to organise on a massive scale without any formal organisation (Shirky, 2008) and to replace effectively a public sphere dominated by a âhub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional linksâ with a public sphere of dense intersecting connections among peers, a ânetworked public sphereâ (Benkler, 2006, Chap. 7). Meetup.âcom did not only improve efficiency in how people organise, it dramatically enhanced peopleâs capability to organise: if mobilisation in the past mainly occurred because political interest was coupled with existing personal connections (family, friends, coworkers) to the organisation (see for example Diani & Lodi, 1989), Internet-based mobilisation does not require them anymore.
What Does the Internet Change for Political Participation?
The core argument of this book is that the impact of ICTs on political participation is dual. A direct consequence of the spread of ICTs is that politicsâin which I include socialising, mobilising, organising, debating and deliberating with political goalsâstarts to take place on (and consequentially to be mediated by) Internet services. Not surprisingly, the relative importance of Internet-mediated politics grows along with the importance that the Internet has among citizens. But the migration towards the Internet introduces important changes to politics. As I observe and analyse throughout the book, the boundaries of political participation blur and ought to be redefined. Because of social media services and because of their role in projecting a userâs identity, politics is not defined any more by only a precise set of activities happening in time and space (a rally, a meeting, but also a discussion around the kitchen table). Politics is nowadays also a meme that trickles through the ties of social mediaâs networks, and political participation is also pressing the like button below somebodyâs post. In the face of a dense literature downplaying the political consequentiality of light forms of political participation, or âclick-activismâ, I argue the opposite. The Internet has opened up options for very low-intensity, âtinyâ (Margetts, John, & Hale, 2015), forms of political engagement that are consequential because they are forms of mass political expression happening on an unprecedented scale. Almost two million Facebook users publicly liked the page of Beppe Grillo, a very simple political action but still taken by enough people to voteâalso a very simple, routine actionâa party into Parliament. In addition, the Internet revolutionises how and how often users may be exposed to politics by easing access to political information and communication and by bringing political contents through algorithmically determined filtering and recommendation systems to users who are not directly searching for them, something that every Facebook user is very familiar with.
But I also point to an important indirect consequence of the diffusion of ICTs on participation, which is particularly salient for the M5S but not totally absent in other instances: the daily use of efficient Internet services raises the expectation of what politics, intended as a service to citizens, should offer (and is not offering). The difference is made striking by the fact that as Internet technologies deliver with incredible efficiency, the old technologies of politics dramatically underperform and especially so by the standards set by the ICTs. As a consequence, citizens already critical towards the political system (Norris, 1999) now have not only a way to communicate and eventually organise on a massive scale their dissent but also to identify the standards of efficiency that politics should aspire to.
What Does the Internet Change for Political Organisation?
The impact that the Internet has on the capacity of people to organise effectively to reach political goals has the potential to alter profoundly the party system and representative institutions in Western democracies. In this book, by observing the trajectory of the M5S, I point to the fact that the Movement by outsourcing to the Internet critical functions such as socialising, mobilising, debating, organising, voting, funding and selecting candidates, did not only create a new type of political organisation but did so by leveraging virtually no pre-existing resources, financial or organisational. Even by acknowledging the exceptional character of the Italian context, which twice in the span of the two decades between 1994 and 2013 saw an outsider attracting most of the popular vote, this seems to support the idea that the Internet, under the right circumstances, might indeed enable organising extremely consequential collective action without organisation (Shirky, 2008). Even if, as I note in the following chapters, organisation does emerge in practice in the form of hierarchiesâin which key individuals assume the authority to take binding decisions, make rules, certify members, groups and candidates and set the agendaâit appears that organisation is most of the time imperceptible and when it emerges it does so in a very light, selective (although not always predictable) way.
What Does the Internet Change for Political Deliberation?
Political deliberation, intended as the full spectrum, from âeverydayâ small talk to formal procedural decision making, is changed by the Internet insofar as it has changed the influence that different social components might exercise on the debate. There is no arguing that the Internet multiplies the fora of debate by creating as many âdeliberative enclavesâ (Sunstein, 2001) as demanded by users. The question is whether and when these fora have an impact on the political process. The book explores the discussion fora of the M5S by leveraging network analysis and quantitative and qualitative text analysis to understand how users take part in the discussion and whether it is possible to identify any instance of a discussion that succeeded in influencing the debate at the national level. A number of studies have been proposed, which for the most part identified a low tendency of users to engage with the diversity and instead to favour interactions with the like-minded. There are different potential reasons for this (many have worried about its social and political consequences) and homophily is not necessarily a consequence of usersâ choices; as the number of ties connecting users to their networks increases the need for social networking services to deploy algorithmic filters to select which content to show to the user. But there are also reasons that could justify the opposite behaviour: users, especially if they perceive that they have the capacity of influencing the debate, might try to reach out to those who held a different view to persuading them. In this book I use statistical models for network data to formally test when and if homophily occurs.
The other debated question of those studying online forms of deliberation is thei...