La politica in rete. Culture civiche connesse tra rappresentanza e partecipazione

The paper wants to explore through theory and empirical research the interaction between citizenship and the new digital media environment. The basic aim is to analyze how the new forms of interaction and engagement allowed by the interactive and participative online technologies can help to foster empowering civic practices. In order to achieve this goal, a preliminary theoretical reflection is needed, one that focuses on the potential intersections areas between audiences, thought as the "persona ficta" (Dayan, 2005) that emerges in the role of enacting attention towards an external performance, and the public, thought as a collective entity that calls external attention and contains a fundamental orientation to shared and consensual action. It will be argued that in order to analyze the co-presence and potential overlapping between these two collectivities, it is necessary to overcome the incorporation/resistance paradigm and to adopt the concept of "mediation" as it has been developed by Silverstone (1999). According to Livingstone (2005), instead of collapsing the concept of public into that of audience, or vice versa, it is more satisfactory to interposing between the two a mediating domain, that of civil cultures (Dahlgren, 2009), thought as thresholds of translation between the sphere of experience and that of politically efficacious action. The paper will take up this hypothesis with the aim of enriching it though the empirical analysis of a case study focused on Beppegrillo.it, an Italian weblog acting as a communicative platform for the development of a civic and political movement which is lead by Beppe Grillo, a well-known comedian. More specifically, two processes of translation will be analyzed. The first one deals with the communicative and civic proposal formulated by the comedian through his blog. Through discourse analysis (Jorgensen and Phillips, 2002; Fairclough, 1995), it will be studied how the blog constitutes a specific civic culture which appears in the form of an "obvious public" (Dayan, 2005) within the putative larger national sphere (Alexander and Jacobs, 1998). Object of observation will be the development of both a peculiar dramatization of civil society and a particular narrative genre, that is a particular relationship between readers, narrators and the characters. Then, the paper will focus on the second process of mediation, that of the blog's audience activity. Though qualitative interviews, it will be explored how Grillo's proposal has been accepted by a "catalysed public" and filtered by its peculiar and pre-existent civic cultures. The sample will be composed by blog's readers that have decided to participate actively through local civic movements, inspired by Beppe Grillo but partially autonomous form him in their political initiatives. The aim will be to analyze the gradual and precarious evolution from "catalyzed public", still dependent from the mediation process of the blog towards an "obvious public", able to perform autonomous presentation in the larger national public sphere.