Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)

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So Far From Political Punditry: Everyday Digital Storytelling in Italy / Enrico Maria Milič, Enrico Marchetto and Roberto Costa (Swg Market Research Company, Triest and Milan, Italy)

 

Abstract: Through on-line quantitative research, this paper analyses, what can be considered some of the political dimensions of blogs. The analysis cross-compares some of the narratives emerging in the on-line debate about this research (and blogging in general), and the quantitative data that resulted from a questionnaire and other studies about blogs outside Italy. After an overview of the composition of the sample, the paper outlines some of the recurrent genres used by bloggers and how these are related to political discourses. Particular relevance is given to data about female bloggers that counters the gendered focus by journalists and scholars about blog genres and definitions dominated by men and masculine values. Utilizing the most common type of blogs, narrative texts based on everyday life, Italian female bloggers engage in a valuable social practice that is based upon shared understanding within niche groups. This type of blogging questions the traditional definitions of politics as applied to the blogosphere.

 

Introduction

<1> This paper analyses the political dimensions of blogs. It is framed in the context of studies about blogging and about inequalities within Italian society. The sources of data include DiarioAperto ('OpenDiary'), a CAWI (Computer aided web interviews) quantitative survey promoted among readers and authors of blogs in Italian by the market research company Swg, the staff of the course in Sociology of Cultural Processes at the University of Trieste, the on-line IT news service Punto Informatico, and the popular on-line blogging service Splinder.com.

<2> The primary motivation for blogging is increasingly defined by scholars worldwide as "self-expression" and the diary-like genre is the most popular (Trammell and altera 2006: 12). Accordingly, a recent study on the American blogging scene has defined bloggers as "the internet's new storytellers" (Lenhart and Fox 2006). Among bloggers, teenagers and women in general are those who seem the most interested in self-expression and in maintaining journal-like blogs (Herring et altera 2004b and cf. Lenhart and Madden 2005). Herring et altera (2004b: 1 and cf. Trammell et altera 2006: 2) state how, in the American popular press, "the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and orientated toward external events" is overestimated, while the importance of blogs as individualistic forms of self-expression" is underestimated". In Herring's interpretation, this biased view is grounded in a peculiar blog genre usually authored by male bloggers that works as a filter of content, opinions, and links. Within this paper we analyze how storytelling is the dominant genre among bloggers. More importantly, we look at how this genre is more or less visible, compared to other genres which are more focused on constitutional politics. The context is that of male-female inequalities which appear deeply rooted within Italian society. In this regard, we draw on the approach of Thompson (2005) who, when analyzing political conflict within the media environment, states that we should focus on what does or does not gain visibility in the media discourse.

<3> There is a broad literature about the definition: 'what is a blog' (Boyd 2006: 9-26 and, within the Italian on-line debate, cf. De Biase 2007 and the subsequent Technorati 2007). Boyd's analysis (2006), focused on blogs in the United Stated and in the London area, argues that blogs should be seen in terms of 'culture and practice'. We welcome her conceptualization: "Blog is not a self-descriptive term and, as a consequence, blogs, bloggers and blogging are being conceptualized in conflicting and unclear ways by both press and academics" (Boyd 2006: 1). While in this paper we focus in particular on the genre of story-telling, like Boyd we argue that for a better understanding of identity processes around blogs and how these are related to power, it is necessary not just to look at content produced by bloggers but to the wider processes of production and reading of blogs.

<4> The analytical approach of this paper is based on the comparison of the quantitative data emerging from the survey with on-line texts that we assessed as representative of the most recurrent narratives circulating in blogs written in Italian. This selection of narratives is based on the experience of the staff of the research, composed of full-time professionals and entrepreneurs in the sectors of new media and market research. This analysis is contextualized with general scholarly and journalistic insights about power structures in Italy. In the following sections, after an overview of the composition of the DiarioAperto's sample, we outline some of the findings from the quantitative data of DiarioAperto about those which appear as the most interesting content for bloggers and their readers, we focus on female bloggers and, finally, we discuss some relevant political discourses and practices around blogging and media in Italian.

The Story of the Survey

<5> The survey DiarioAperto was based on a questionnaire to be answered through computer-aided-web-interviews (Cawi). The drafting of the questions and of the topics of the questionnaire, the composition of the sample and the interests around the research should be better outlined as they are quite peculiar and, more generally, they are related to our broader methodological preoccupations about the statistical significance of the results (as in Eysenbach 2004).

<6> As in ethnographic approaches (Clifford and Marcus 1986 and Clifford 1988) we were aware of the power relationships between the interviewees and the researchers that see the latter as setting the agenda of the research and the vocabulary that is used within its main tool (the questionnaire) and its findings. Therefore, we adopted peculiar public standpoints. Firstly, when we opened the official blog of the research in December 2006, we always explicitly made the aim of the research clear, that was to investigate the relationships between blog authors and readers and the messages from the media 'public sphere' (cf. Volkmer 2003 and Castells 2007: 258). Secondly, we immediately put under on-line public discussion the questionnaire of the research, asking for suggestions on topics or even precise texts for the questions to be included in the questionnaire.

<7> Finally, we announced that the entire database of the answers to the questionnaire would be freely and publicly released on-line, once the research had come to its conclusion. [1]

<8> This public strategy had peculiar effects which should be related to the circulating narratives within computer culture in Italy, such as those about the collaborative construction of content and the free circulation of creative products and ideas. No doubt, many bloggers publicized DiarioAperto because it was tuned to these values and several forum users supported the initiative for the same reason. In fact, the preliminary phase of this on-line research triggered and gathered an overall of about 100 comments as e-mails and other blog entries. These messages, according to our requests, suggested what the aims of the enterprise should be and sent suggestions for questions to be included in the questionnaire.

<9> Then, some of the questions and topics from users were selected and put in the questionnaire. Equally important, this phase allowed us to focus on the vocabulary of 'blog people' which was particularly helpful for the researchers when, within the writing of the final texts of the questions, we had to name and describe particular tools and actions within blogging and internet services (cf. Laurie 1992: 147). The final draft of the questionnaire contained 90 questions about sociodemographics of the respondents, their opinions and behaviors towards the media, consumption and corporate marketing, and Italian politics.

<10> The promoters of DiarioAperto publicized all the phases of the research. From January 24 to April 15, 2007 the questionnaire was available on-line and could be accessed. In particular, Splinder.com released, on its network, 1,500,000 banners advertising the possibility of answering the on-line questionnaire. At the same time Punto Informatico continuously publicized it for the same period.1 No doubt, the visibility provided by Splinder and Punto Informatico greatly affected the composition of the sample of interviewees who answered the questionnaire. Moreover, many blogs publicized the questionnaire, after having heard of it through other blogs or through the already mentioned websites.

<11> It should be noted that within the agenda of the companies setting up the research there has always been a clear interest in gaining visibility from it. Quite probably, the brands of the promoting companies have benefitted from the broad traditional and non-traditional media coverage around DiarioAperto (see Del.icio.us 2006-2007).

The Composition of the Sample

<12> We raised a total of 4,117 questionnaires that we considered as valid data, while 1,740 questionnaires were rejected. Within this sample, we rejected questionnaires with inconsistent answers and those that were not completely filled out. 3,453 respondents among valid questionnaires identified themselves as blog authors while 664 identified as just blog readers.

<13> There are limitations of our sample to be highlighted. Obviously it is impossible to create a probabilistic sample of blog authors and readers in Italy (there is not a public list of members of this category). Moreover, within an on-line survey as DiarioAperto, whose questionnaire was accessible to every internet user, it is clear how strong risks of self-selection of the respondents were present. For the same reason, each questionnaire respondent could not be identified (he / she might have filled the questionnaire with wrong information). We already argued about the broad set of websites advertising the questionnaire.

<14> Considering such reservations, the only way to assess the validity of this sample is by comparing it with the figures about net users given by Istat, the public National Institute of Statistics in Italy (Istat 2006, 2007a and 2007b).

<15> As far as age and male/female ratio are concerned, we can see meaningful differences concerning internet usage in Italy across generations and genders. Given 100 as the totality of users, men outnumber women by 10.5%. This gap varies depending on generations. Between 18 and 24, there is the same number of males and females, while as age increases the percentage of males is higher than that of females. Among DiarioAperto respondents this trend is similar: while around 60% of the respondents between 45 and 64 were male, between 18 and 24 the sample was composed of 52% women.

<16> Participants in our survey go on-line almost every day and 78.6% of them were on-line before 2001. Generally speaking, these people can be considered better educated and more tech-savvy than the average Italian internauts described by Istat.

 

	Population (a)	Internet users (b)	Sample of DiarioAperto (c)
15-24	12,0	23,3	27,5 (*)
25-34	16,7	26,3	42,6
35-44	18,8	25,0	19,6
45-54	15,5	16,4	7,0
55-64	14,0	7,0	2,7
65 and above	23,0	2,0	0,5

a) resident population 1.1.2006, Istat (2007b)
b) our processing of Istat data (2006)
c) data of DiarioAperto
(*) for DiarioAperto the class refers to respondents between the age of 14 and 24.

 

	Population (a)	Internet users (b)	Sample of DiarioAperto (c)
North-West	26,5	30,3	29,8
North-East	18,9	21,2	23,6
Centre	19,3	21,0	25,1
South	23,9	18,3	14,3
Islands	11,4	9,2	7,2

a) resident population 1.1.2006, Istat (2007b)
b) our processing of Istat data (2006)
c) data of DiarioAperto

 

Findings about Politics and Communities

<17> Many of our respondents are not that much interested in constitutional politics as a topic for blogs: 'politics' is mentioned by blog authors as content of their texts less than half the time with respect to 'personal/private accounts' (Table 3) and is usually considered less interesting among blog readers compared to other topics (Table 4).

<18> Affection for Parliamentary politics among DiarioAperto respondents seems quite low: for example, only 34.2% trust the Prime Minister and only 16.2% trust the leader of the opposition. Furthermore, there are data suggesting that laws concerning on-line services released by Parliament are not easy to digest for these citizens: a great majority of blog authors and readers criticize governmental restrictions on peer-to-peer computing. Only 13.1% would agree with a law enforcing controls on blog content. Finally, only 17.4% agree with a law defining the free download of music and videos as illegal.

<19> One could surmise that blog authors and readers are lacking political commitment. Another interpretation would argue that bloggers see those measures discussed by representatives in Parliament as irrelevant to or strongly against their interests and are therefore scarcely interested in blog texts about politics.

<20> What is then the kind of community these people belong to, through their on-line personae? The large majority of our interviewees (69.8%) state that they read no more than 20 blogs a week. Figures from Splinder.com, the popular Italian blogging service promoter of DiarioAperto, state that the average blog is visited (once or more than once) by 16 users per month. [2] Is it that bloggers and their readers live their on-line communication interaction in close, politically apathetic communities? Are these people affected, in Castells' words, by 'electronic autism' (2007: 247)? We will try to answer to these questions in the next section (and in the rest of the paper) looking at what type of content blog authors and readers are most interested in.

 

Personal/private accounts	69.2
Music	38.5
Literature	33.0
Politics	31.5
Love/feelings	31.1
Informatics/web	28.5
Cinema	27.8
Arts	20.8
Television	20.2

 

Personal/private accounts	65.6
Informatics/web	47.6
Politics	45.1
Music	40.7
Literature	33.2
Cinema	31.2
Other	30.2
Love/feelings	28.3
Television	25.9

 

Findings about Bloggers' Interests and Most Recurrent Content

<21> The findings of our survey about the kinds of attitude by bloggers towards their readers and their content production confirm past studies carried out on blogs written in other languages than Italian.

<22> Everyday life of the interviewees is a strong source of inspiration for bloggers: two thirds of the respondents of DiarioAperto (66.8%, Table 5) state that 'episodes from real life' are the source for the entries of the blog authors. 'Politics' appears much less interesting for many readers and authors compared to 'personal/private accounts' (Table 3 and 4). Again, these findings confirm previous insights outside Italy (cf. Lehnart and Fox 2006: ii – iii and Trott 2004). Obviously, the whole range of the surveys under analysis would support the criticism by Castells on the 'electronic autism' of bloggers.

 

Episodes from real life	66.8
Other blogs	35.2
Newspapers	14.6
Other news websites	14.9 (*)
Television	13.8
Repubblica.it	12.6 (*)
Forums	7.3

(*) Respondents had the opportunity to select specific news websites as Repubblica.it or, after a list of these main news websites, to select "Other news websites."

 

<23> But when we look at the different content and genres of verbal expressions, we start to be uncomfortable with the clear-cut idea that bloggers and their readers are just confined in apolitical solipsism. The anthropologist Carrithers (1992: 76-117) argued how we could identify two main genres in verbal production: narrative thought and paradigmatic thought. Paradigmatic thought is a forced dialogue and puts the producer of the text on an upper level: she argues through generalizations, theories and so on—as in religion and in ideological discourses—where the audience cannot usually challenge these views. On the other hand narrative thought is based on stories that can flesh out social implications about the subjects of the text and can involve an inter-subjective and interactive negotiation of meanings between the producer and the consumer of the text. Carrithers' insights imply that narrative thought is often much more effective and involving than the other, and that narrative thought is indeed political.

<24> If it is true that the main source for blog entries is given by events taken from the individuals' lives, we can see how those blog authors are enabling a strong inter-subjective dimension, where the personal content of the entries is open to interpretation by the reader. For example, a reader can identify herself in the story told by a narrator and engage its political implications.

Findings about Gender: Female Internauts as the Emerging Figure in Italian Blogging

<25> In this section, we analyze some of the differences between the quantitative data emerging from the 1,791 female respondents in contrast with male ones who participated in DiarioAperto.

<26> Compared to the male author, the female author seems much more interested in reflexivity about her own life experience. 38% of women (14.8% of males) stated that they often write about "love/feelings'. Indeed, the most significant data comparing male and female behavior are about the blogs' content. What kind of representation are women willing to produce? 81% of women (53.6% of men) use 'real life episodes' as sources for their entries.

<27> Inasmuch as the most popular genre of blogging is where individuals' lives and sociality become prominent, we can see how among female bloggers and female blog readers there must be some of the most representative practitioners of blogging's 'narrative thought'.

<28> We find support for this standpoint when we look at other data regarding preferred content both by female authors and readers of blogs: women readers are much more interested than men in blogs dealing with 'Personal/private accounts', 'literature' and 'love/feelings'. These data again confirm the assumption that many women are strongly interested in narration and in the reflection of people's personal experiences. [3]

<29> Feminist literature, for example writings by Virginia Woolf (1981) and Hélčne Cixous (2001), questioned patriarchal structure in knowledge production and advocated the active creation of a new literature that is conscious of gender differences, directly challenges masculine power, and is focused on human personal experience. While we cannot draw a direct connection between these thinkers and an active intellectual engagement of blogging women in this sense, it is interesting to see how the women of DiarioAperto evaluate politic-based content: reading and writing blog entries dealing with politics interests women less than men. We will discuss in the next sections how these figures cannot be easily interpreted if we do not take into account the dominant position of men within Italian society.

<30> There are other figures from DiarioAperto suggesting how, over the coming years, women may increase their influence in Italian blogging. In our sample, 52% of those respondents aged between 18 and 24 were women and this is the only age range where females are the majority. It is interesting to compare DiarioAperto data with two other surveys carried out on American blogs. One of them, conducted in 2005 by Lenhart and Madden, states, "Older girls, aged 15-17, are the most likely to blog; 25% of on-line girls in this age group keep a blog, compared with 15% of older boys who are online. About 18% of younger teens of both sexes blog". Another study, conducted during August 2007 by the private firm Synovate, states how "more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14% of men". This data about the U.S., which has a longer history of people connected to the internet and where citizens use on-line services much more than in Italy, suggests how there is a general trend of women increasingly colonizing the so-called blogosphere. Appositely, we can see how, among young Italians involved in blogging, women are a majority: the future of blogging in Italian could therefore be following the U.S. figures in the next years. [4]

	Females	Males
Respondents to the survey	1,791	2,326
Average age	22	27.1
Respondents to the survey between 18 and 24	563	520
Have more than one blog	40.5%	33.3%
Comments whenever she/he has 'something relevant to say'	56.7%	49.9%
Read blogs because 'because of the friendship relation with the writer'	40.4%	23.9%
Who do you write for? 'For me'	74.6%	55.2%
What do you write about in your blog? 'Love/feelings'	38%	14.8%
What are the main sources for your blog entries? 'Episodes from real life'	81%	53.6%
What do you write about in your blog? 'Politics'	31.5%	42.2%
What are the topics of the blogs you read more? 'Politics'	31.3%	55.7%

 

Criticism of these Findings from an Italian Blogger and Scholar

<31> As we have already seen in the previous sections, people engaging with blogs interested in 'politics' (framed in folk terms, that is 'constitutional politics') are much smaller in number than those interested in stories about the personal experience of people – and we have also seen how women are much less interested in 'politics' than men. These figures outline a recurrent distance between thosse people writing or reading blogs and the sphere of constitutional politics.

<32> Carlo Formenti (2007a and 2007b), Italian journalist and scholar, wrote some comments after we released the data of DiarioAperto and our interpretation of them (Mili, Marchetto and Costa 2007). In that document, we suggested a reading of the female bloggers that we followed in the previous sections of this paper. In our view, the comments of Formenti can be seen as representative of many circulating narratives among mainstream media and some liberal male bloggers. Herring (2004b) depicts a debate about the U.S. that we consider quite similar to the Italian public discussion about blogs: "public commentators on weblogs, including many bloggers themselves, collude in reproducing gender and age-based hierarchy in the blogosphere, demonstrating once again that even an open access technology—and high hopes for its use—cannot guarantee socially equitable outcomes in a society that continues to embrace hierarchical values". From a column in a national newspaper and from his blog, Formenti advanced these kind of critiques focused on our reading about blogging women:

Why do the editors [of Diario Aperto], instead of adding two plus two, sing the praises of women's blogs, … attributing to them the role of the avant-garde in a cultural revolution which will inevitably lead to a personalisation and the decline of professional information? The answer, if we want to be nasty… lies less in "feminist" enthusiasm for the alleged "empowerment" of an army of "online housewives from Voghera" [5] and more in the commercial potential of the research. [6]

Formenti complains that the researchers of DiarioAperto supported "the triumph of the vocation to chatter over the informative and counter-cultural pretensions of cultured and politicized bloggers" (Formenti 2007a). In his view we are dismissing the relevance of the debate about constitutional politics among bloggers and uncritically praising the profiles of bloggers where personal stories and inter-subjectivity are salient. Formenti's standpoint, although he is directly criticizing our research, can be seen as very similar to that of other well-known Italian bloggers and blog essayists. Granieri, for example, although he admits that some bloggers are less interested in politics than others (2004: 4), sees blogs and their reciprocal linking as crucial cornerstones of new discursive practices enabling a new 'model of democracy' (2004: 5).

<33> As we have seen, the data from DiarioAperto reported in the previous section of this paper and many other studies confirm the quantitative prominence of blog content based on what Formenti frames as 'chatter' and 'personalization' of content. Herring et altera (2004a) provided three basic types of blog genres: "the content of filters is external to the blogger (links to world events, online happenings, etc.), while the content of personal journals is internal (the blogger's thoughts and internal workings), and k(nowledge)-logs are repositories of information and observations with a typically technological focus". In their study about American bloggers they state, "Although filter blogs in which authors link to and comment on the content of other web sites are assumed by researchers, journalists and members of the blogging community to be the prototypical blog type, the blogs in our sample are overwhelmingly of the personal journal type (70.4%)". Further reasoning by Herring et altera (2004b) claims that there is a skewed distribution of the gender and age of blog authors in relation to blog type. They write, "the journal type is dominated by teen females (and is favored by females in general), whereas adult males predominate in the creation of filter-type (e.g., news and politics-oriented) blogs and k-logs, as well as in the "mixed" category, which necessarily includes either filter or k-log content".

<34> Their conclusion is that the selective focus of many opinion makers on filter-style blogs (and partially also k-logs) 'reproduce societal sexism and ageism around weblogs as cultural artifact' (Herring et altera 2004b). They state that it is hardly a coincidence that all these practices reproduce a public valuing of behaviors associated with educated adult (white) males, and render less visible behaviors associated with members of other demographic groups. The Italian case-study of DiarioAperto confirms these general trends about masculine hierarchical readings of blogs. Noting the context drawn by Herring et altera, it is important to acknowledge how blogs are democratizing public discourses as there is a redistribution of authors among women and young people who are under-represented within Italian politics. [7]

Discussion: The Political and Sensible Experience of Bloggers' Storytelling

<35> The Italian political and media discourses are imbued with male values and are scarcely representing females in terms of structural powers and in the content of public discourse (Cacace et altera 2006 and cf. Partridge 1998: 122-127, Boeri and Del Boca 2007). Moreover, Italy seems unable to represent young people within politics, academia, journalism, and the job market; many journalists and scholars define Italy as a country sick with 'gerontocracy' (Israeli 2005, Povoledo 2006, Rizzo and Stella 2007, Sofri 2006, The Economist 2007, Violante 2006).

<36> We have seen in the previous sections that the definitions of blogs and the attention paid by researchers and journalists in Italy about specific masculine genres of blogging (filter-blogs and k-logs) are in deep contrast with the most widespread practices of blogging, where women, and young women in particular, are the most important practitioners of on-line diaries based on life experiences and personal thoughts. [8]

<37> At the moment, there is no direct evidence that under-represented groups such as women and young people are consciously expressing themselves through on-line diaries as blogs and thinking, at the same time, about the political outcomes of their action. But it is interesting to see how Thompson (2005) states that, when analyzing political conflict within the media environment, we should focus on what exists and what does not exist as content in the media. He states, "The public domain itself has become a complex space of information flows in which words, images and symbolic content compete for attention as individuals and organizations seek to make themselves seen and heard… To achieve visibility through the media is to gain a kind of presence or recognition in the public space, which can help call attention to one's situation or to advance one's cause" (Thompson 2005: 49).

<38> We argue, reinterpreting Thompson's insights, that we should avoid downplaying the political meaning of 'narrative thought' in blogging. These texts, mainly produced by women and young people, are highlighting facets of citizens' lives. They are read by the few dozens of individuals around an average blog and, necessarily, by those users interacting with these texts after having been redirected there by services such as Google. Therefore, these types of blogs are increasingly engaging people within media landscape in Italy as elsewhere.

<39> In 1936 Walter Benjamin published the essay 'The Storyteller' where he outlined what should be thought of as the main features of the 'art of story-telling'. In order to draw a comparison between many bloggers and Benjamin's story-tellers, we briefly summarize some of the characteristics of what this thinker considers the exemplary storyteller: she draws her stories from her or other acquaintances' experiences and shapes them as an artisan; her sources are based on word of mouth communication; every story is open to interpretation, contains something useful, is confined in commensurable first person experiences; eventually, the story becomes a social communal experience for the performer and her listeners.

<40> Obviously, there are differences between bloggers and Benjamin's storytellers. The main point of contrast is that the former performance is not based on oral performances but usually on screen texts. [9] But we think that the context allowing storytelling has some striking points of contact with that allowing today's blogging. It is not just that the source of the content is based on experiences in both cases and that they can both provide useful counsels as, for example, blog users commenting on their jobs, the last purchase of some products or the evolutions of romance or friendships; we should also look to the community interacting with the storyteller. Benjamin states that a bored audience is required for giving room to storytelling: like the individual in the medieval hamlet, where people who were the audience of storytelling were not continuously busy with work, rest or entertainment. Intuitively, blogging seems similar: many readers of blogs find the opportunity to read blogs out of the rhythm of production like, for example, postgraduate students hanging around blogs while job hunting or chatting to friends. Both activities are an experience with a strong inter-subjective dimension. They both require a small community of involved people as it is the only context where one could really interact and negotiate meanings with other humans.

<41> The parallel with Benjamin is useful in two main considerations. Firstly, in Benjamin's view (1968), in modern times the invention of printing allowed competing genres to emerge as novel, contemporary history, and journalistic information at the same time started the decline of storytelling. Since then, "never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power… nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body". Going back and forth from Benjamin's essay to blogs based on life experiences, it is clear how diverse contexts of media and public discourses affect the emergence or the disappearance of public stories based on the 'fragile human body'. Benjamin calls into question 'those in power' and, here again, it is easy to see how bloggers, by contrast with media conglomerates, professional politicians or journalists, respond to quite different structural powers: that is, in the case of bloggers, simply themselves and women in particular.

<42> Secondly, we are convinced that blogs are emphasizing dilemmas of our democracies. Howes, commenting on a Ekman's essay, writes, '[t]here are no reliable proportions to life any more, no, in McLuhan's term, 'sense ratio,' or sensory reason' (Howes 2004: 12). In this view, our bodies live in a society that is permeated with 'often scarcely comprehensible transformations'. We suggest that the implicit political problem and radicalism of many blogging practices should be necessarily framed through the role of our senses as media. We should get rid of the schemata in which ethical social practices can only see the individual as thinking herself as part of a mass (a citizen of the 'imagined community', an activist of 'citizen journalism', a member of the 'big conversation' of bloggers and so on). Many bloggers are a good example of people engaged in a social practice that is not thought for the many but for the few –as the storytellers. Like the storytellers they are engaged in the interaction with a small audience around their story - and their practices work because of this.

<43> We already argued how these experiences among bloggers should be considered as political. This is because they make new demographics emerge as authors of public messages and because, as in Carrithers, personal stories can trigger subjective processes of identification which are necessarily political.

<44> The resulting unsolved dilemma is obviously about the capacity for institutions to interact with and acknowledge the importance of personal experiences and, on the other hand, for bloggers and their readers to give explicit political relevance to the experience of these new media storytellers. [10]

Conclusions

<45> The data of our research confirm general trends given by many quantitative studies about blogging outside Italy.

<46> We argued how the facts of individuals' lives can enable a strong inter-subjective dimension and that they should be therefore considered potentially dense with relationships of power. Nonetheless, journalists and scholars only define and pay attention to the genre of 'filter-blogs' that are based on links to world events, online happenings, constitutional politics. The focus of this opinion makers hides and devalues blogs describing everyday life and their authors, mostly women. This trend, described by Herring et altera about the U.S., seems salient also within Italian media discourse and politics, which are imbued with masculine values and gender inequalities.

<47> Using and reinterpreting Thompson's framework emphasizing visibility in the media as strictly related to power, we argued that many bloggers are implicitly presenting in the public discourse the everyday life of citizens, the 'fragile human body', and small social communities. As contemporary storytellers, many bloggers are presenting a dilemma to our democracies about the effective representativeness of our political institutions.

<48> Further research should be conducted on the political dimensions and outcomes of many bloggers' personal narratives. Some other data of DiarioAperto would already suggest how within blogs' narrations about consumption there is a new challenge about the power of corporate marketing and consumerism within the Italian society. [11]

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Notes

[1] Visibility to the questionnaire had also been given by 10 'candidate blogs' who were willing to be examined by their users within a special section of the questionnaire of DiarioAperto. Other minor partners (AdMaiora, BlogBabel, Blog di Grazia, BlogItalia, Prodigi) gave visibility within corporate newsletters, web-sites, mailing-lists. This wide range of supporters came along with many entries published on other blogs. These diverse spots of visibility allowed the researchers to obtain interviewees within various social groups of net users. For the whole of web pages commenting and/or linking see Del.icio.us 2006-2007 in the bibliography section. [^]

[2] We calculated these figures knowing that in May 2007 Splinder.com had 'more than 300,000 opened blogs' and is visited by almost 5 million users each month (Lo Jacono 2007: 5, footnotes). Roberto Lo Jacono from Splinder.com states how they consider active blogs about 20% of the total of their blogs. While it is clear that 'opened blogs' does not correspond to active blogs, we should remember how the entirety of visitors is also generated by search engines like Google that could lead internet users to non-active blogs. Nevertheless, we think that our inference can give a good general idea about the dimensions of the average quantity of visitors per blog. [^]

[3] Meaningful features of female bloggers' behaviour can be interpreted as related to the education background of these female respondents. 30.7% of them have a university degree in Italian Literature, while there are 14.7% males holding the same degree. Only 3.9% of them hold a degree in Engineering, while engineers make up 20.7% of male respondents. [^]

[4] A study by Rainie about U.S. blogging, published in January 2005, stated that male authors were a 57% majority. As we have seen in our survey conducted two years later about Italian blog creators and in the past section about the sample composition of DiarioAperto, men outnumber women by 10.2%. [^]

[5] The epithet 'housewife from Voghera' ('la casalinga di Voghera') is used throughout Italian mass-media to indicate the stereotypical badly-educated, gossip-addicted, confined at home woman. [^]

[6] While it is certainly true that the brands of the companies and institutions who promoted the research gained fruitful visibility from DiarioAperto, it is unclear to us what Formenti means when he alludes to the 'commercial potential of the research'. [^]

[7] Importantly, Formenti raised another point: the relationships between blogging, our interpretation of the data, and capitalist market dynamics. Also before the release of the data in June, some bloggers criticised this research because, in their view, DiarioAperto was moved only by marketing and advertising interests of the companies promoting it (Aghost 2006, Salvelli 2006, Toso 2007). Further research should come back to the point of how bloggers, through their accounts of life experiences, can challenge corporate messages. Some other data of DiarioAperto would support the standpoint for which narrative content about consumption is changing the attitudes of blog users toward purchases. Surowiecki (2004), referring to a 'new breed of consumers' and their empowerment given by internet communities wrote, "Over time, certain brands came to connote quality. They did provide a measure of insurance… That sense of protection is eroding industry after industry." [^]

[8] In the case of Formenti, we can see a comparable analysis in Doostdar (2004: 660), who argued how in debates within Persian blogging there is a clash between hegemonies and counter-hegemonies: there, "[a]n intellectual class sees its own linguistic and cultural authority threatened by the 'vulgar' practices of bloggers and a disparate class of non-intellectual deliberately undermines this authority". [^]

[9] We should bear in mind that as many noted how on-line, personally authored texts blur the distinction between orality and textuality. [^]

[10] Indeed blogs are more loosely connected than is suggested by the myth of blogs as the medium that is the best enemy of traditional politics and journalism. Trippi (2004), the strategist of the most famous on-line political campaign, illustrates how Howard Dean's campaign was not just based on blogs but on many other necessary web community tools. [^]

[11] In this regard, we should remember how Appadurai (1996) and Baudrillard (1970) have seen consumption as the most relevant aspect of people's identities within Western societies. What does this mean politically? How are on-line blog texts challenging corporate messages about products? [^]

 

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