Blogs and information in Italy

Résumé du document

Democracy is not reducible to the regular election of national representatives through an equitable voting process. In its most demanding version, it actually has to guarantee to everyone the same access to information, to be "a genuine struggle for knowledge", to quote the Genoese humorist Beppe Grillo. But despite its democratic foundations, the Italian regime has been incessantly overwhelmed by information scandals throughout the last decades, to such an extent that until this year, Reporters without Borders annually warned the international community of the danger with its reports.
In their own way, Beppe Grillo and her colleague Sabina Guzzanti have decided to take advantage of technology to reverse this order of things. Respectively in 2005 and 2006, they opened their own blogs, which almost daily enumerate the failures of the Italian economic, political, social and informative system. The humorous tone enables both of them to entertain the reader as much as they try to provoke an awakening of his conscience of citizen. Quite surprisingly, they gradually gained not only a tremendous popular success, but also a growing recognition from their peers.

Extraits

[...] This can be summarized as the great paradox of the Web (Leblanc, 2007), namely the most massive of mass medias, which against all odds, links people at the most individualistic and exclusive level. Unlike TV spectators or newspapers' readers, this heterogeneous audience is both producer and consumer of news. It does not merely watch the world like in a TV fiction. Here, amateurs or expert readers are allowed, and encouraged, to react in order to approve or disapprove of the thesis exposed. [...]

[...] No condemned people should sit in the Italian Parliament (today they are still 25) 2. No more people doing just the politician job (as we have today): Politicians should be allowed to candidate for the parliament for no more than 2 legislatures .3 No more people placed in the parliament by the parties, only by direct elections from the citizens. Some witnesses have reported that people were queuing sometimes for hours in order to sign for this law proposal, which in the end has signatures, among which prominent personalities. [...]

[...] Politics won over publicity. My own view of the matter is that political blogs emerged with a similar mechanism. They would not have expressed the same revolt without this delusion about the traditional Medias, their contacts with economic, political, or illegal circles. If we observe the personal careers of Beppe Grillo and Sabina Guzzanti, both of them have experienced a repressive context which prevented them from exerting freely their activity. For instance, Guzzanti's show has been cancelled in 2003 after its first broadcast, regardless of its good audience rates. [...]

[...] For this theory and its former and current supporters, literature and journalism are not antonymic notions as long as style does not hinder truthfulness. Bloggers even go as far as to rely on the multiplicity of informative sources on the Internet to counter the side effects of subjectivity. A personal blog does not, undeniably, have the same requirements of rigor that the RAI's telegiornali. Far from being a frustration, this absence of official responsibilities is a great opportunity for Grillo and his fellow-workers. [...]

[...] Currency LAZAR Marc (2006), L'italia alla deriva (not translated), Paris, Perrin LEBLANC Claude (2007), the Web will change life (again) : Revolution 2.0 in Courrier International, p 43-56 MORETTI Carlo (2006), “Beppe Grillo scatenato contro politica e informazione”, in La Repubblica NEWELL James (1999), New parties, new medias : Italy and the Internet, European Studies Research Institute, Salford PADOVANI Cinzia (2005), A fatal attraction : public television and politics in Italy, Roman and Littlefied, Oxford PALMER Sherry (2007), Television disrupted, Focal Press SEELYE Katharine (2006), journalist leaves his pedestal” in Courrier International n°794 WOLFE Tom (1973), New Journalism, Harpercollins college http://www.beppegrillo.it/ http://www.sabinaguzzanti.it/blog/ http://rsf.org/ In Funes or Memory, Borges reports the troubles of a young man whose hypermnesia forces him not to leave his room in order not to record every detail of outside. Overwhelmed by the phenomenon, he finally dies. [...]