Rethinking grassroots campaigners in the digital media: The ‘grassroots orchestra’ in Italy

Abstract

The diffusion of digital media allows the emergence of new types of relations between grassroots campaigners and organisers. This article presents the results of a comparative qualitative study of two Italian cases of grassroots online participation: a local electoral campaign and a single-issue social movement. The first case is ‘Tell your Milano’, a project that took place during the electoral campaign for Mayor of Milan in the spring of 2011. The second case is the ‘Purple People’ (Popolo Viola), an Italian social movement started in 2009 to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The article introduces the concept of a ‘grassroots orchestra’: a grassroots campaign aimed at a short-term objective, coordinated by a non-grassroots political actor and performed by a community sharing a uniform and coherent context.

数字媒体的扩散导致了草根运动家与组织者之间新型关系的出现。本文对两个意大利草根在线参与案例——一为地方选举运动，一为独立议题社会运动——做了对比定性研究。前一个案例是所谓“告诉你一个马力诺”，是2011年春米兰市长选举中的一项活动。另一个“紫色人民”始于2009年，是一个要求贝卢斯科尼总理辞职的社会运动。本文引进了“草根乐队”的概念，意即短期目标的草根运动，由非草根政治主体协调，并由处在同一语境中的一个社群来完成。

Keywords:

• grassroots activism
• digital media
• storytelling
• Italy
• social movements

Notes

¹Rosa Parks was the African–American activist who, on 1 December 1955, refused to give her seat to a white passenger in a bus. She was arrested for civil disobedience and for violating Alabama segregation laws, and her case became a symbol of the civil rights movement (Polletta 2006).

²Eco, for example, uses the concept of aberrant reading to point out how messages may be interpreted differently from what was intended. One of the processes through which the aberrant reading is explained is the refusal of the message through delegitimisation, which happens when the recipient does not see the sender of the message as reliable (Eco 1976). Militant political actors and social movements may be misrepresented by mainstream media and therefore their messages may be seen as extremist and delegitimised by audiences.

³Digital storytelling is a process in which people ‘who have never done so before are telling personal stories through digital forms, storing and exchanging those stories in sites and networks that would not exist without the world wide web and which, because of the remediation capacity of digital media, have multiple ‘possibilities for transmission, retransmission and transformation available to them’ (Couldry 2008: 374). This phenomenon provides the means to tell important stories about oneself more widely – to represent oneself as a social, and therefore potentially political, agent – in a way that is registered in the public domain (Couldry 2008; Lundby 2008).

⁴Here, I refer to the dynamic relations between campaign organisers, who need to maintain control over the flow of information that springs from the citizens' voice in order to avoid discrepancies with their aims, and grassroots actors, who do not always agree to be directed or limited by organisers, and may create narratives that contradict campaign organisers.

⁵According to interviews with campaign managers, there were two positive rewards of the project for the candidate. The first reward was to strengthen the ties among Pisapia's supporters. The presentation of many individual stories on the map was an attempt to find and communicate a grassroots meta-narrative shared by a community. The second reward was to provide popular legitimacy to the political campaign for all the stakeholders of the election. The presence of grassroots political storytelling on the website of the candidate communicates by itself: (1) values coherent with Pisapia's campaign, such as the importance of the base of supporters for the political leader and the weight of the people's voices; (2) the idea of popular support, and a positive relation between Pisapia and the citizens of Milan. These hypotheses should be validated through empirical research.

⁶Meso-level agents, such as community organisations and social movements in the digital or local media, start promoting and/or incorporating the individual stories that micro-level agents, such as the individuals, produce (Chen et al. 2012). After that, the grassroots stories may be broadcast by macro-level storytelling agents as well, such as the mainstream media and the political leaders, framing these stories and messages in terms of broader geographical areas, and therefore contributing to the imagining of larger communities, such as national communities (Anderson 1991; Chen et al. 2012). Following this scheme, the process of grassroots political storytelling is discussed along with case studies, focusing on two steps: (1) from the individual agency of the micro-level agents to the meso-level agents (2) and to the macro-level agents.

⁷The protest, held on 5 December 2009, emerged almost exclusively from the Internet, and especially from Facebook and Twitter. Thousands of independent and self-organised internet users actively participated in the call, both forwarding the political message through the internet and sponsoring the protest in the ‘real’ world through leafleting, street stands and demonstrative political performances (Vergani 2011).

⁸Networked social movements' autonomy has been questioned for the absence of real independence from dominant power logics (Hoofd 2012). Moreover, the research of other scholars reasonably suggests that grassroots political activism in the digital media is rarely effective in the political institutional arena and that grassroots storytelling is mostly driven by social interaction, which provides the largest gratification to those who participate through writing stories, commenting on others' stories and meeting people offline (Marmura 2008).