Italian Political Blogs in Prospect. A study of the Democratic Potential of the on-line Public Sphere

The present proposal draws on the results of my master’s dissertation which intended to study the communicative practices taking place in on-line public spaces and, specifically, within two “political” blogs of the Italian blogosphere. It aimed to evaluate the capacity of such blogs to be instruments for making public sphere; that is, instruments able to contribute to democratize democracy to the extent that they might configure new ways for the creation of public opinion. The two blogs were selected for their apparent antinomy; hence, on the one hand, the blog of comedian Beppe Grillo and, on the other hand, the one of the politician Paolo Guzzanti. These blogs presented significant differences among several dimensions: audience size and popularity, political culture background, authorship and rational argumentation. The study utilised three social research methods: on-line surveys, virtual ethnography and content analysis. The analysis of the case studies has been divided in two parts. The first aimed to understand how the two blog complied with public sphere theory normative requirements through a culturalist approach. This analysis allowed to highlight the fundamental relevance of social determinations within the frame of a democratizing use of new media technologies. The second part, regarding the evaluation of democratic potential, has been conducted separating analytically the two main, and consequential, functions of an Habermasian public sphere. That is, to maturate considered and legitimating public opinions among peers and the capacity to “push” such orientations to breach the “hydraulic enclosures” of the inner political system. The empirical evidences allowed to highlight how the two blogs actually developed only one of these functions but it has also shown that a democratizing function, in a wider sense, can be achieved outside the curb of public sphere theory. Such an ascertainment led to conclude that the normative model of the public sphere lacks sociological realism but, nonetheless, it remains an invaluable tool to exert a critic of systematically distorted communication environments.