Blogs, politics and ethics: the case of Beppe Grillo

Index What is a blog? Blogs and new texts Grillo’s blog Conclusion

Blogs, politics and ethicsthe case of Beppe Brillo

Federico [email protected]

Insubria University


1 What is a blog?The emergence of blogs as new mediaBlogs and citizen journalism

2 Blogs and new textsPush vs. pull mediaNew texts as narrow casting and personal mediaAn integrative framework

3 Grillo’s blogA political, ethical and glocal blogThe keys of Grillo’s blog successEvaluation of Grillo’s experiment

4 ConclusionPower ‘Long Tail’ LawBlog evolution


Blogging as the last hype phenomenon in the web

Every day there is someone in the world who is opening a blog. InJune 2006 Technorati, a web hub, tracked 35 million blogs and thenumber still increases. Only 5% of these blogs is active, and only13% is updated at least once a week (Powazek, 2006).

One of the key factors of the widespread of blogs is their easinessof use, i.e. you don’t need to be a computer scientist to publish ablog, it is as easy as write an e-mail message.


History of blogs in brief

The first blogs, called ‘weblogs’, were simply updated collections ofhyperlinks to Internet items. It was in the late 1990s that weblogsbecame blogs, thanks to Jorn Barger, Jesse James Garrett andBrigitte Eaton. In 1999 she created the Eatonweb Portal, the firstblog index.

What is the difference between a blog and a personal web site?This question lead us to analyse structural properties of blogs.One of my theses is that blogging should be treated alongstructure, not blog contents.


What the other media tell about blogs

In 2003 blogs entered the Oxford American English Dictionary,according to Wikipedia, with the following definition:

a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americanswith at least an unhealthy interest in computers”.

In my opinion saying that a blog is a weblog is a tautology.


The emergence of blogs as new media

Blogs as vehicles of ethical and political issues

Blogs are more than what is said in the Oxford American EnglishDictionary. They are not bond to specific topics as high-tech news,gossips or boyfriend problems.

In particular, there is a social phenomenon worth of interest aboutblogs as self-made ethical and political journals, sometimesorganized in groups, called blogospheres.


The emergence of blogs as new media

Blogs as typical web content media

Internet and the web in particular were born as a space for freedomof speech. Ethical blogs – at least partially – realized whatBerners-Lee (1999), the founder of the web, thought about it morethan 20 years since the beginning.

Some of the most popular blogs are focused on specific threads ofdiscussions, in particular on ethical and political topics. In fact,blogs got the attention of the general public expecially afterSeptember 11, the Tsunami emergency in Asia or during the 2004US elections – all global political issues.


Blogs and citizen journalism

Blogosphere as the citizen journalism arena?

Unlike blogs considered as personal diaries, ethical bloggers pay agreat attention to spelling and grammar, as in the best journalismtraditions.

Is it true that “the former audience joined the party” (Gilmor)?Should we consider blogs as the media of citizen journalism?



Myth and truth of citizen journalism

‘Citizen journalism’ is an expression invented by Gilmor(2004:137–140), and it has at least four different meanings:

1 people send amateur photographs or small videos on a majorevent – e.g. taken via a mobile – to a news organization;

2 people participate in conversation about a specific topic,sometimes along with professional journalists;

3 people on site report daily life experience where mainstreammedia cannot – e.g. Zeyad ‘Healing Iraq’ blog in 2003;

4 people cover a specific topic or event under an unusual orunique point of are. They are often actively engaged in thetopic – e.g. Linux activists on the SCO Group claiming patenton the Linux kernel.



Citizen journalism and new texts

Citizen journalists use the following as their election media:

1 wikis;

2 web forums;

3 blogs.

We should briefly examinate analogies and differences beforeanalysing Grillo’s blog.


“New” in respect of what?

After the press revolution media could reproduce contents inidentical copies. These “old texts” are broadcasted media: themodern book, newspapers (the press!) and television are all equalin this respect.

Contents are pushed to users, considered as consumers.


Push vs. pull media

The “push media” model

push media

content A

content A

content A

content A

John Smith

Mario Rossi

Jack White

Pietro Bianchi


Push vs. pull media

Pull media as the reverse of push media

In the 1990s the web as a mass phenomenon reversed the pushmedia model as the pull media model. Media publish off-the-shelfcontents and people choose what they want or what they need.

Nevertheless, this reverse does not capture the novelty of newtexts: people no longer consume products but on the contraryproduce new contents, as understood by the citizen journalismparadigm.


Push vs. pull media

The “pull media” model

pull media

content A content Ccontent B content D

John Smith Mario RossiJack White Pietro Bianchi


New texts as narrow casting and personal media

New texts are different

What wikis, web forums or blogs are in common is theirenvironment: Internet and the web. Every net-connected computeris a node. Metcalfe’s Law says that the value of a communicationnetwork is the square of the number of nodes. Every nodecommunicate with few (or many) nodes producing new contents.

Communication is no longer one-to-many (push media model) ormany-to-one (pull media model) but the narrow casting model:few-to-few.


New texts as narrow casting and personal media

The narrow casting model: new texts as personal media

People browse, cut, copy, paste, comment, mix and publishhand-made contents. But how to get important in a connectedenvironment? Usually, this emphasis to personalization implies aneed to be part of a (virtual) community (Levy 1999:116–129).

Every form of new texts group around a specific model ofcommunity. What really change between a grouping of wikis, webforums and blogs is authoriality.


An integrative framework

The “wiki way”

The “wiki wiki concept” (wiki means ‘fast, informal’ in Hawaiian)was invented by Ward Cunningham, an extreme programmer. Hestarted from an analysis of groupware systems, since Engelbart’sAugment (Leuf-Cunningham 2001). The most famous and popularwiki system is Wikipedia.



How a wiki system worksMultiple editors but no authorship: “write many, read many.”

wiki content

edit A edit C

edit Bedit D

John Smith Mario RossiJack White Pietro Bianchi



Thread systems

Wikis were explicitely created as an alternative to thread systems,as the old BBS, most mailing lists, or web forums and web groupsas those by Yahoo Groups or Gmail “conversations”. Every threadis recognized by the topic. The root message is not special in anyway.

They typically have a tree structure. Every node is a message or acomment and it’s signed. Unlike wikis, they are seldom modified oredited.



How a thread system worksMultiple editors and authorship: “write once, read many.”

thread content

root msg

spin-off topic

comment A

comment B

John SmithMario Rossi

Jack White Pietro Bianchi

comment Dcomment C



Blogospheres are authored, commented and/or annotated

In blogs there is clearly an author – maybe collective – who writesposts. Posts are ordered chronologically. Sometimes authors letpeople comment in their blogs, sometimes people prefer to post acomment in their own blog (annotation).

Blogs taken singularly are similar to threads, but the root messageis the most important. On the other hand, taken as a whole, i.e.blogospheres, blogs are similar to wikis, but they still retainauthorship.

This model is the most suitable for citizen journalism, more thanwikis and thread systems.



How blogs workSingle author and freedom to comment: “write yours, read and comment the others.”

's blog

post A

a comment

post B

John Smith

Jack WhitePietro Bianchi

's blogMario Rossi

post C

post D annotates B

Monday

Thursday

Wednsday

a comment




single user multi-user

authoriality

anonymity

wikis

blogs threadsystems


An experiment of direct democracy in ItalyHow Beppe Grillo explains his blog during the shows

Today I consider commercials as one of the worst things,economics as the padrone of politics and Internet as oneof the few possibilities to defend themselves and to giveto politics back the space economics have stolen.January, the 26th, 2005, I opened a blog,www. beppegrillo. it . I didn’t know exactly what ablog really is when I started. I begin to understand it onlynow. I don’t know where this experience may lead, but Ifeel that it may lead us very far. If we use it well,Internet may help us throw away this world, governed bymanagers of multinational corporations and theircommercials and governors.

Vitaliano (2006:211)

www.beppegrillo.it


Grillo’s blog history in numbers

opened 26 January 2005;

in June 2005, Technorati rated Grillo’s one of the most readworldwide;

in 2005 Time elected Grillo ‘European hero’;

8 June 2006 the Italian president of the Council RomanoProdi received the political proposals discussed in the blog.

Today the blog has about 150,000 contacts per day, about 40,000downloads of La Settimana (The Week), i.e. the paper version,and tens of meetups (spontaneous real-world groups) worldwidewith about 18,000 people joining.

Beppe Grillo’s Blog, 8 June 2006


A political, ethical and glocal blog

A blog very easy to use

Grillo writes his posts in Italian, and a professional translator putthem in English. Posts are published simultaneously in bothlanguages, even comics. You may change language by click on theflag on the right of the navigation bar (6 buttons and the flag aslanguage switcher).

A parallel corpus of texts...

...leads to an asymmetryBy now, “best comment” and “the Week” are in Italian only


A political, ethical and glocal blog

The very base is rooted in the Italian speech community

Compared with Powazek’s blog, who shares the same degree ofpopularity, Grillo’s blog is far less linked. Comments in English arerare and few. Meetups are mostly Italian-based.

But the “always bilingual posting” policy raised the attention ofmedia hubs as Time (out of the net) or Technorati.com (in thenet). Similarly, the use of syndications and a CreativeCommons(cc) licence put the blog in a wider network of attention.

Maybe afterwards this situation will change, i.e. a lot of attentionby the English-speaking community.

A professional use of syndications


The keys of Grillo’s blog success

A blog on glocal issues with original posts

Posts are organized in topics such as Information,Technology/Internet, Energy, Health/Medicine and so on.Sometimes posts are relevant to the Italian speech community(local issues), sometimes they are relevant to everyone (globalissues), but they are always ethical in character. Political posts aremostly of local – i.e. Italian – interest.

Every post is written in plain, clear language, in order to be easilyunderstood, as in Grillo’s shows. The principle behind is clear:Grillo says (1) either what everyone knows but nobody has thecourage to say, or (2) something glocally relevant that mainstreammedia – i.e. tv news and the press – don’t say.

The GrilloNews page along the Google News modelGrilloNews may be reached by syndication too



Preserve your freedom to change the message

We are overload by news that let us understand nothingabout what happens. We should act by night. I went outby night with a big pencil and I wrote over a politicalposter... The day after people were coming and laughing:the poster message turned against itself. Write over, donot graffiti. Change the message.

Vitaliano (2006:203)

An example of creative message change: goolagRef.: Grillo was censured by Google in China as e.g. Tienamen



Grillo’s success: professionality, popularity & credibility

Beppe Grillo built his credibility in more than 20 years. He becamepopular in Italy in the 1980s thanks to comic shows in RAI (Italianstate television), where he denounced the paradoxes of Italiansociety and governments. Then he was interdicted from appearingin television, and in 1990 he started sold-out tours in Italiantheatres. He succeeded to appear in television thanks to Tele+ andTSI (Swiss-Italian Television) where he pronounced discourses tohumankind (1999, 2000, 2001), always about global issues such asecology or energy.

Since 2004 Grillo is columnist at Internazionale (monthlyinternational political magazine). Then it came the blog (January2005), the meetups (July 2005) and La Settimana (January 2006).


Evaluation of Grillo’s experiment

La Settimana, authoriality and the comments dilemma

“La Settimana” is back to ancient times, to dazebaosand self-made xeroxing... Print and read, but without toowide publicity. “La Settimana” is a step back to goahead: Net information again in the street.

La Settimana 1(1), Jan 2006

The paper version of the blog is without comments. After thegrowing of the readership, most comments are off-topic: commentsare on top chronologically.



A blog explicitely thought to influence politics

I have a blog that makes me work: people write, adiscussion thread starts about a topic I choose. A personwho can publish nothing may have 50,000 people readingwith a blog. This is a new form of communication.Moveon.org follows the same principle: one millionpeople send an e-mail message to the White House andthey change a law.

Vitaliano (2006:223-4)



Beppe Grillo’s authoritativity and blogging

This is the main difference with most bloggers: Grillo’s voice wasauthoritative before his blog. The structure of the blog wascarefully planned at the end of 2004 by Beppe Grillo andGianroberto Casaleggio, an Italian web analyst.

The aim was to transfer Grillo’s style – quality and unusual news,and professionality – into the web. The team who works dailybehind the blog is more than 10 people (personal communicationby G. Casaleggio). Among them the English native-speakingtranslator and a man who clean the comments (even 1,000comments per post) from obscenity and insults.



Citizen journalism or journalism tout court?

In the integrative framework of blogging, Grillo’s is very traditional:a single author writes professionally, he listen to readers but hedoesn’t actually answer to them – quite impossible!

Grillo’s experiment of direct democracy seems to me closer to thebest traditional opinion journalism – like a columnis, more than tocitizen journalism, i.e. self-made amateur news a la Gilmor.


Ethics and politics in ICT today: net and paper

12 June 2006 The Guardian announced that news are publishedfollowing net time, not daily time as before. The trend is newsmedia osmosis: the press go towards on line rules, and ICTblogging towards paper.

Blogospheres follow the Power ‘Long Tail’ Law: withoutpublication space boundaries, narrow or special interests may berepresented unlike in the push media model, but the head may bereached only by few (20%) net hubs.

Anatomy of the Long Tailsource: Wired 2005

Most popular English-language blogssource: Power Law 2003

Most popular Italian-language blogs before Grillosource: Casaleggio Associati 2005


Blog evolution

From the blog revolution to the blog evolution

level 0: publication. A blog is started, even tracked by a nethub (e.g. Technorati) but not maintained – i.e. no posts.

level 1: maintenance. A blog is started and kept alive – i.e.at least one post a week.

level 2: active reading. A blog is commented and/orannotated by others – i.e. it enters the blogosphere.

level 3: top blog. The blog reach the top levels of reading,entering the head of the long tail.

level 4: blog gets real. The blog get the attention of pushmedia, a print version is published and meetups are formed.

Beppe Grillo’s is one of the few blog that reached level 4 evolution.


Blog evolution

Thanks

I want to acknowledge Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio.

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Blogs, politics and ethics: the case of Beppe Grillo