Blogs and information in Italy

Democracy is not reducible to the regular election of national representatives through an equitable voting process. In its most demanding version, it actually has to guarantee to everyone the same access to information, to be “a genuine struggle for knowledge”, to quote the Genoese humorist Beppe Grillo. But despite its democratic foundations, the Italian regime has been incessantly overwhelmed by information scandals throughout the last decades, to such an extent that until this year, Reporters without Borders annually warned the international community of the danger with its reports.
In their own way, Beppe Grillo and her colleague Sabina Guzzanti have decided to take advantage of technology to reverse this order of things. Respectively in 2005 and 2006, they opened their own blogs, which almost daily enumerate the failures of the Italian economic, political, social and informative system. The humorous tone enables both of them to entertain the reader as much as they try to provoke an awakening of his conscience of citizen. Quite surprisingly, they gradually gained not only a tremendous popular success, but also a growing recognition from their peers.

[...] Even though his master of the codes of fiction was brilliant, and enabled him to offer a romanticized version of political life, he actually invited the Italians to reconstruct their democracy of them went voting in 2006 to answer Berlusconi’s challenge and discredit the telecracy’s thesis. And it is a well-known fact that the man who defeated him, Romano Prodi, has no particular skills for selling his image in TV shows. The “professor” won over Television”. Politics won over publicity. [...]

[...] Is it as frightening as in Borges’ imagination?[1] So thinks the Italian thinker Umberto Eco : after having staunchly criticized television for its superficial acceleration of political time, he now regrets that the Internet spreads mistakes, slander and approximations at the same level as the most respectable information : exhaustiveness of information is as arguable as its lack”.[2] Some opponents of blogs have even gone further in their accusations, considering that the real danger remained in the new involvement of citizens in the informative process, regardless of their legitimacy. [...]

[...] First, the more convenient and successful navigation is, the more successful blogs are, and above all, it reminds us of their primal mission of a personal committed viewpoint. As a matter of fact, blogs are at equal distance from two extremes, the diary and professional journalism. (Seelye, 2006) They propos interpretation rather than the dryness of facts, so that somehow they apply the principles of the journalism” doctrine put forward by Tom Wolfe in the early 1970s. For this theory and its former and current supporters, literature and journalism are not antonymic notions as long as style does not hinder truthfulness. [...]