Political protest Italian-style: The dissonance between the blogosphere and mainstream media in the promotion and coverage of Beppe Grillo's V-day

摘要

We analyze the organization, promotion and public perception of V-day, apolitical rally that took place on September 8, 2007, to protest againstcorruption in the Italian Parliament. Launched by blogger Beppe Grillo, andpromoted via a word of mouth mobilization on the Italian blogosphere, V-daybrought close to one million Italians in the streets on a single day, but wasmostly ignored by mainstream media. This article is divided into two parts. Inthe first part, we analyze the volume and content of online articles publishedby both bloggers and mainstream news sources from June 14 (the day V-day wasannounced) until September 15, 2007 (one week after it took place) . We findthat the success of V-day can be attributed to the coverage of bloggers andsmall-scale local news outlets only, suggesting a strong grassroots componentin the organization of the rally. We also find a dissonant thematicrelationship between content published by blogs and mainstream media: while themajority of blogs analyzed promote V-day, major mainstream media sourcescritique the methods of information production and dissemination employed byGrillo. Based on this finding, in the second part of the study, we explore therole of Grillo in the organization of the rally from a network analysisperspective. We study the interlinking structure of the V-day blogospherenetwork, to determine its structure, its levels of heterogeneity, andresilience. Our analysis contradicts the hypothesis that Grillo served as atop-down, broadcast-like source of information. Rather, we find thatinformation about V-day was transferred across heterogeneous nodes in amoderately robust and resilient core network of blogs. We speculate that theorganization of V-day represents the very first case, in Italian history, of apolitical demonstration developed and promoted primarily via the use of socialmedia on the web.