Maurizio Geri, PhD student

GPIS/ODU

Social media and social change

A comparative analyses between Tunisia, China and Italy

This paper analyzes the effects that social media have on thepromotion of social change. Specifically, the research focuses on therole of social media as a tool to increase unification of communitiestowards stronger social capital, to open space for a new potentialpublic sphere and ultimately to foster social change social change.This work argues that the use of Internet has different effects indifferent cultures and societies. As a reflection of society, socialmedia multiplies the effects of the people’s action and can evenimprove their connections and their social, and political power.Social media cannot, however, change the principles, features andgoals of the society itself. If the society has a low level of socialcapital it’s not social media that is going to create it. If thelegitimacy of a political regime is based on the popular support ofits country social media will not change it. And if the democracy in acountry is blocked by the ‘party politics’ social media will notcreate participatory democracy from scratch.

I try to demonstrate this with three case studies: Tunisia, to see howis the situation now in the country that has been the sparking of ArabSpring; China, where national social media, often censored, don’tchallenge (at least until now) the political system; and Italy, weresocial media have been the tools that brought the 5 Star Movement, asocial movement guided by a comedian, into the Parliament.

This research is grounded by a theoretical framework integratingdifferent points of view, drawing from the theories of Habermas,Castells, Hardt, Negri, Gerbaudo, as well as from specific concepts of

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social change, like the “propaganda of the seeds” and the “stigmergy”concept.

Social Change and social media: a brief literature review

Social change is something multidimensional and complex as it ismade of many elements, different cycles and sometimes contradictoryresults, but is ultimately depending on both a change of mentality anda change of the structures of the society is its whole. The Hungarianphilosopher, Arthur Koestler, argued in 19451, that social changeenforced only from inside, with cultural and personal transformation(as the Yogi aims to do in his life) or only from outside, with atransformation of the political structure of the society (as theCommissar seeks to do) are both bound to fail. This happens becauseboth elements are needed for a real social change: the individual andcultural change and the systemic and political change. Antonio Gramsci2

also affirmed that the struggle over ideas and believes (the ‘war ofposition’) had to go together with the revolutionary struggle (the‘war of manoeuvre’) in order to succeed in the social change. So boththe reflection behind the action, in order to challenge the ideas ofthe status quo, and the action itself were both needed, according toGramsci, for a real social change. Manuel Castells, the Spanishsociologist who forged the concept of modern network society, also wroteabout this two elements: the modern social movements as actors forcultural change (they can change the values of a society) and their‘insurgent politics’ as actors for political change (they challengethe institutions for the adoptions of those new values)3.

If social change requests both change in ideas and structuresthan what does it come before or is anyway more important: the innerprocess and the cultural shift or the action at the base of themobilization? The emotional identification with a need for change orthe realization of the triggering act that challenge the status quo?We can answer to this question in several ways. If we follow the

1 Koestler A. 1945. The Yogi and the Commissar. MacMillan. 2 Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.3 Castells, M. 2009. Communication power. New York: Oxford University Press.

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‘propaganda of the deed’4, as Italian revolutionary Carlo Pisacaneargued: “ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around”5. AlsoMikhail Bakunin, the famous Russian philosopher, wrote that “we mustspread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is themost popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form ofpropaganda”6. Often though the ‘propaganda of the deed’ has beenassociated with violent revolutionary acts of anarchist, and thissometimes jeopardized the important contributions she could have inthe challenging of the status quo. At least until the XX century, whenthe Anarcho-pacifism7 born and the propaganda of the deeds got closerto concept of Thoreau’s civil disobedience and Gandhi’s nonviolentresistance, with nonviolent actions and inner change as both importantelements for social change8. Also others scholars explained theimportance of the action in itself. Hannah Arendt for example affirmedthe value of recuperating the Vita Activa of great deeds and great wordsin our modern age9. Finally according to the so called ‘stigmergy’concept,10 social movements can benefit from the common action thatderive from spontaneous collaboration11. Following these theories we4 The ‘Propaganda of the deed’ is a political action that aim to be exemplaryto others, usually associated with anarchism and its consequent violentpolitical actions to challenge the status quo (regicides, assassinations etc.)5 Pisacane, C. 1857. Political Testament. Also see Mann Roberts, R. 2010. CarloPisacane's La Rivoluzione: Revolution: An Alternative Answer to the Italian Question. Matador. 6 Bakunin, M. 2002. Bakunin on Anarchism. Sam Dolgoff ed. Montréal: Black RoseBooks. P195–6.7 Anarcho-pacifism has been a form of anarchism and pacifism inspired byTolstoj, Thoreau, Gandhi and others, that saw nonviolence as the only tool forsocial change, in particular before and during WWII. See Woodcock, G. 2004.Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. University of Toronto Press 8 These concepts that have been used with success in many countries, from the ‘People Power Revolution’ in the Philippines to the African-American civil rights movement9 See on this: Wittkower D. 2012. The Vital Non-Action of Occupation, Offline and Online.International Review of Information Ethics Vol. 18 (12/2012)10 See: Elliott, M. A. 2007. Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for MassCollaboration. Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts. The University ofMelbourne. Also: Heylinghen F. 2007. Why is Open Access Development so Successful?Stigmergic organization and the economics of information. To appear in: B. Lutterbeck, M.Bärwolff & R. A. Gehring (eds.), Open Source Jahrbuch, Lehmanns Media 11 Stigmergy is a philosophical concept derived from insects’ life, whichrefers to a form of self-organization and collaboration of the masses withoutneed for any planning or control.

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could say that the deed, the action in itself, is what bring a realchange, an authentic transformation of the society.

Before or besides the deed, nevertheless, the change of ideas andvalues has to happen, in both the minds and hearts of the people, ifwe want a change to succeed, as Madiba Mandela, Dr. King or MahatmaGandhi showed to the world during last century. These inspiringfigures guided and drove an emotional shift, individually andcollectively, that pushed their societies to pass from the fear, whichblock the people and maintain the status quo, to the anger, thattrigger the action in a process of risk-taking behavior12. As recentresearches in neuroscience demonstrated (Damasio, 2009)13 at its rootindividual or collective action is motivated emotionally and so we cansay that also social movements are set in motion by emotionalstimulus. For the triggering of social mobilization we need anemotional identification with the rest of the ‘imagined community’ asBenedict Anderson would say, a construction of ‘emotional coalescence’(as Paolo Gerbaudo14 explained in his analyses of Arab Spring andOccupy Movement) a sharing of personal views and goals, that push forthe action as expression of this emotion. So we may agree withGladwell who said that “revolutions will not be tweeted” but notbecause, as he argues, new media activism are based on weak ties thatare not enough powerful for social change15. The real reason is thatrevolutions grow in the belly of the population, before than in theirmind, and so before to be tweeted need to be ‘felt’. We could arguethan that the process of connection between hearts and minds stays atthe base of the triggering act that challenge the status quo. There isnot one that comes before or is more important than the other though,both the change in the mind of the people and the structure of thesociety are needed and crucial.

12 For this concept of anger as trigger and fear as repressor see “The AffectEffect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior”, Marcus,Neuman and MacKuen, University of Chicago Press, 2007. 13 Damasio, A. 2009. Self comes to mind. Pantheon Books. New York. 14 Gerbaudo P., 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. PlutoPress. 15 Gladwell, M. 2010. Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. The New Yorker(2010, October 4)Fom http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

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The question that comes to the mind now, in our modern andtechnologized societies, is what is the critical role of social mediain this process of emotional identification and organized action? Canthey help to create the humus for the emotional push of a commonaction or do they just reproduce a fragmented society helping in thisway the maintenance of the status quo? It is difficult to answer thesequestions as scholars are still studying the effects of Internet andSocial Network Sites (SNSs) on our societies but media philosophersagree that besides being technologies or ‘things’, SNS are also‘concepts’, processes that transform our communication and influencethe individual and social identity of the people. How they do it andwith which results is still to be discovered, but drawing again fromCastells, probably the most recognized scholar in media theory, we cansay that the current social movements have as the most importantcommon feature their ‘culture of autonomy’. Social movements create thisculture of autonomy through the SNS, translating the so called‘culture of individuation’ in the practice of autonomy. With anempowering process of re-learning how to live together as a community,social media play a fundamental role creating the conditions for ashared practice that help a movement to coordinate and act16. This hasbeen the case for example of Arab Spring, where, supposedly leaderlessmovements were able to overthrown the regimes of their countries.Gerbaudo in his analyses of these revolutions and the modern socialmovements like Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, argued that socialmedia, besides helping in the creation of the emotional humus,facilitate also what he calls a ‘choreographical’ leadership. This isa type of horizontal and ‘soft’ leadership that people share togetherin guiding and managing the social action17. But independently by thefact that these movements had or not a leadership the reality is thatsocial media had an enormous impact in their success and these twoscholars helped us to understand it better, without going towards anoptimistic and almost messianic view (like Clay Shirky). The limit ofCastells or Gerbaudo theories though is that they didn’t clearly askif social media would have act in the same way in other type of16 Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the Internet age.Cambridge: Polity17 The process of mobilization according to the scholar is based on the notionof “assembling” and gathering rather than networking

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societies, if SNS could have had similar effect independently by thedifferent cultures of the societies where they are used. This researchthink that is important to try to predict if their effect would be thesame everywhere or they would depend on the community in which socialmedia live and act, on the social fabric of that community and on itsvalues, needs and goals.

The argument of this paper, adding a cultural approach and theresearcher direct experience, is that social media are a socialproduct and as such they empower and magnify the mental and politicalculture of the society in which they live, but they don’t change it,or create by themselves new values or new needs. Surely social mediaare tools for a possible change as they facilitate mobilizationscreating the emotional ‘coalescence’ and identity that can drive arevolution. We can even venture to say with scholars like Diamond andPlattner18 that social media can act as a ‘liberation technology’. Butthe argument of this paper is that we cannot think to social change asdirect consequence of the use of social media. Social media cannotmake a society think differently, change people’s mind creating a needthat didn’t exist before (like for example a regime end) or createfrom scratch a new social capital in the society. What they can do isa process of “training citizenship”, opening space for the potentialpublic sphere and empowering the people to become more activecitizens, preparing them for future transitions towards moretransparent and democratic systems. As they did in Tunisia and Egypt,after Ben Ali and Mubarak allowed populations to use them for years.As they are doing in China, even if the government is not usingAmerican social media but created its own, in order to control and notbe controlled. And as they are trying to do in Italy, where a comedianled a movement of citizens to enter the Parliament thanks also to theNet. We will be back on the comparison of these cases in the secondpart of the paper but before let’s do a brief analysis on two specificconcepts that are important in the process of social change: socialcapital and public sphere. How different cultures influence them andhow social media affect them differently depending on the society inwhich they exist. 18 Diamond L., Plattner M. 2012. Liberation technology. Social media and the struggle for democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Social capital and public sphere: can social media create them?

Societies around the world as we know are generally culturallydefined and roughly divided between either collectivist orindividualistic societies. The first ones (often referred to moretraditional societies in the Global South) emphasize especially groupwork, family ties and tend to have a higher level of social relations.The individualistic societies (often referred to Western developedcountries) concentrate more on personal achievements and individualgoals and tend to have less deep social connections. Obviously this isa broad generalization that cannot be taken as absolute truth but aswe know ‘culture matters’ as Weber but also others19 taught us, andthey have an impact on the type of development and social connectionstypical of that society. These general differences about the structureof the society across cultures (as well as similarities) are notstatic though but they change with time. If we take into considerationfor example the “dimensions of culture” of the Dutch scholar GeertHofstede20 we see how the individualistic attitude in Western countrieshas increased in last decades. Hofstede argues in particular that inWestern societies since the ‘60s we had a reduction of collaborationamong people, diminishing the so called ‘social capital’ in civic,associational and political life, and this pushed these societies from‘collectivist’ to more ‘individualist’ features. Social capital is aconcept based on the value of social networks and became popular withthe studies of Robert Putnam, who did researches in Italy (to see howsocial capital was making democracy work in some regions better thanin others) and in US, arguing also that social capital was decliningin America. It can be defined as “features of social organization suchas networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and

19 See also : Huntington S., Harris L. 2001. Culture matters: how values shape human progress. Basic Books. 20 Hofstede utilizes six dimensions to compare cultures and analyzesocieties/organizations: Individualism-Collectivism, Feminine-Masculine, PowerDistance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-Short Term orientation and Indulgence-Restraint. See Hofstede, G. Jan Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill USA, 2005

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cooperation for mutual benefit”21. Putnam in particular differentiatedthis concept between ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ type: the first iscreated when we socialize with people who are like us (same age, race,religion etc.) the second with people who are not like us (fromdifferent cultural groups for example, but also with differentpreferences or goals)22.

It is difficult to evaluate if mass media or even Internet hadany role in this reduction of social capital in our Western societiessince the 1960s. But we can ask if in our societies today social mediahelp to increase or decrease it and if there are differences ininfluencing the two types of ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ social capital.This is still a debate among scholars even if there is a tendency toconsider internet as leverage for more ‘bonding’ social capital, as itopens more spaces for networking with similar persons23, while there isnot the same consensus regarding the impact on the ‘bridging’ type.Some authors argue that this type of social capital is not incrementedbut reduced by social media because their use reproduce thefragmentations and disaggregation of our societies. Cass Sunstein, anAmerican legal scholar, worries about the risks for democracy of usingInternet, because we tend to listen and speak only to the people withsimilar interests and values making us not used anymore to discussdifferent points of view24. A famous internet activist, Eli Pariser, isconcerned by the policies of the corporations owing the social media,which create often an online separation of interests reducing ouropenness to diversity (with the so called “Filter Bubble”)25. Other

21 Putnam, Robert D. 1995. Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal ofDemocracy 6: 65-78. 22See: Putnam, Robert D., Lewis M. Feldstein, and Don Cohen. 2003. Better together:restoring the American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. 23 Boase, Jeffrey and Barry Wellman. 2005. "Personal Relationships: On and Off theInternet." In Handbook of Personal Relationships, edited by A. L. Vangelisti andD. Perlman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.24 Sunstein, Cass R. 2007. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press.25 Pariser, Eli. 2012. The filter bubble: how the new personalized Web is changing what we readand how we think. New York: Penguin Books. Parisier argues that the filter systemsof social media, that control users’ preferences to make marketing moves,reduce exposure to different areas, points of views, interests, and, as aresult, users become separated from what disagrees with their view, isolatingthem in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.

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scholars nevertheless see also the bridging social capital increasingwith social media (like showed in a research made on Facebook use inthe American campuses26).

The researcher makes an argument here (trying to demonstrate itwith case studies) that this effect depend by the type of society inwhich social media are used, as they reflect the core values that arealready in the society but don’t change them. So for example insocieties that are more individualistic and tend to have less physicalinteraction or less social capital, like our modern Western societies,the empowering effect of social media is more about the individualpurposes, related with personal interests, than the common interest,reproducing in a way or another the disaggregation of the society. Inthis way social change is not so much promoted by social media as theycannot build from scratch social capital that doesn’t exist. Insocieties instead that are more prone to debate “on the streets” orsocieties where the solidarity of the community is a common value,like in the Mediterranean/Latin or the so called traditionalsocieties27, social media tend to reproduce these connections,reinforcing them in a virtuous process of reciprocal influence and soalso reinforcing the possibility of social change. We will be back onthe concept of social capital with the Tunisia case but for now let’ssee the possible influence of social media on another importantconcept for social change: the ‘public sphere’.

In order to understand the role of social media in influencingsocial change we have to understand also if in our globalizedsocieties during the current information age there is a space for a realor at least potential ‘public sphere’ or not. Our modern Western

26 Ellison, N., Lampe, C., Steinfield, C., & Vitak, J. (2010). With a little help from my Friends: Social network sites and social capital. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), The networked self: Identity, community and culture on social network sites (pp. 124-145). New York:Routledge.27 See on traditional societies: Diamond J. 2012. The World Until Yesterday: What CanWe Learn from Traditional Societies? Viking Edition. About the higher social capital intraditional societies see the work of Geertz, Malinovsky, Mauss and theexamples of communal work: African Ubuntu, Indonesian Gotong-royong, PhilipinoBayanihan etc.

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societies have been described often as ‘liquid’ (Bauman) ‘networked’(Castells) or even sometimes ‘inexistent’. Recently in fact there hasbeen a philosophical and political critic to the concept of society asa united entity or a ‘commonality’, since Margaret Thatcher in the1980s claimed that “there is no such thing as society, but onlyindividuals and families”. Many argued that this attempt to show thelack of a united society was a goal of neoliberalism since the 1980s,aiming to break the social cooperative relationships that could haverepresent a challenge to the liberalist status quo. The same view ofdisaggregated society, and of Internet reproducing it, can be seenalso in many modern social scientists, even if not inspired byneoliberalist view, like in the analyses of Laclau’s ‘populism’28,Latour’s ‘ANT theory’29, the ‘multitude’30 concept of Hardt/Negri, thenetwork society31 of Castells or the ‘networked individualism’ of Wellman32.If we follow these concepts there is not much place for a potential‘public sphere’, the sphere of social life where people of differentideas can come together to discuss common problems and influencepolitical action. What is the role of social media in the creation ofthis ‘public sphere’ than, if they tend to reproduce the fragmentationalready present in the society and even magnifying it?

Jurgen Habermas33, defining his famous concept of “public sphere”,argued that democracy improved with the birth of the bourgeois statebecause of the invention of the press and the creation of publicspaces. Thanks to this people could debate and discuss social orpolitical ideas similar to the situation in the ancient Greek Agora

28 Laclau, E. 2005. On populist reason. London: Verso. 29 Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-Network Theory. OxfordUniversity Press. 30 Hardt, M., and Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: war and democracy in the Age of Empire. NewYork: Penguin Press.31 Castells M. 2004. The network society: a cross cultural perspective. Cheltenham: EdwardElgar Pub. 32 Wellman argues that today we live in horizontal individual networks (peopletogether for specific purposes) rather than identity groups (based onclass/religion/nationality etc.). This is not creating isolation butrepresents the declining of self-identity and action through hierarchicalgroup’s identity towards more horizontal ‘preferential’ networks. Wellman, B.and Rainie, L. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. The Mit Press. 33 Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The structural transformation of the public sphere. MIT Press.

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(the city square). But in reality the public sphere was not completelyrealized (just as in the Agora) as the press needed literate populationto have its effect and cafes and theatres were frequented by highclasses (usually white men) while working classes, women andminorities were still excluded from a possible ‘res-publica’ (publicthing). Antonio Gramsci34 also talked about this concept, consideringthe civil society of 19th and 20th century as the public sphere wheretrade unions and political parties gained concessions from thebourgeois state (but also as the sphere in which ideas and beliefswere shaped and where bourgeois ‘hegemony’ was reproduced through themedia, in order to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy). Anotherfamous scholar, Benedict Anderson, coined the concept of ‘imaginedcommunities’ to refer to the new communities to which people imaginedto belong with the birth of “print capitalism”35. These communitieswould have created according to Anderson a ‘public sphere’ using printtechnology and would have also be influenced by media that couldtarget them addressing citizens as their ‘public’36. Finally twocontemporary scholars, Hardt and Negri37, suggested that today weshould reconsider the distinction between public and private spheresas new technologies create new ways of communication and cooperationthat give to the collective potentialities (the ‘new commons’) animportant economic value.

Today, with the empowering potentiality of the new media, wecould argue that while old mass media, being passive and uni-directed,had the risk of control over the masses, modern media, being insteadmulti-directed, have democratic potentialities. This not only as tools

34 Heywood, A. (1994) Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction. Macmillan. 35 Anderson introduced this concept to explain that with the birth ofprinting, capitalist entrepreneurs printed books and media in the vernacular(instead of exclusive script languages, such as Latin) in order to maximizecirculation and so created the imagined community of nationality, not existingbefore. 36 Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread ofnationalism. NYC: Verso. According to Anderson’s definition ‘Imaginedcommunities’ are not based on everyday face-to-face interaction between itsmembers, so similarly we could define also social media communities asimagined communities.37 Hardt, M., and Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: war and democracy in the Age of Empire.Penguin Press.

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of communication and information (‘from one to many’ and ‘from many tomany’, as Castells would say38) but as tools for the creation of a real‘public sphere’, with new possibilities of political action and civicengagement (as Diana Saco and others scholars argued with ‘cyberingdemocracy’, ‘digital citizenship’ and ‘private sphere’39). We couldagree with these theories because social media today have an importantrole in ‘training’ people as we said, in particular youth, to expresstheir ideas and making them more active citizens. We will see thatpotentiality in all our three case studies. But there are two majorlimits in the use of Internet that make the concept of public spherestill something ideal more than something completely realized (just asit was with the old media). These two limits are the digital divide and thenetwork surveillance exercised also on the new media. Regarding the first,the use of the new media follow the same concept of inclusion andexclusion and the same access and usage inequality of the old publicspheres. Who has no access to Internet, i.e. people living in areasthat are not connected, or who don’t have the technical skills to useit, is obviously excluded from this new ‘virtual sphere’, as Norris40

and Papacharissi first argued41. The second reason that still keeppublic sphere as a potentiality not completely realized comes from thefact that communication is a sharing and a construction of meanings,and so it is an exercise of power42. As a consequence who control thecommunication can exercise an enormous power on the public opinion38 Castells, M. 2009.39 See: Saco, D. 2002. Cybering democracy: public space and the Internet. Electronicmediations: v. 7 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Also : KarenMossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Ramona S. McNeal. 2008. Digital citizenship: theinternet, society, and participation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. And: Papacharissi, Z.2010. A private sphere: democracy in a digital age. Cambridge, UK; Malden, USA.Papacharissi defines the ‘private sphere’ as a sphere facilitated by newtechnologies, that even if is not a direct recipe for more democracy is anattempt to create new spaces and new sociality, useful for democracy.40 Norris Pippa. 2001. Digital Divide? Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the InternetWorldwide. Cambridge University Press. 41 Papacharissi, Z. 2002. The virtual sphere. The internet as a public sphere. From New Mediaand Society n. 4, 9-2742 Castells, the most famous scholar of media and power of communication,defines communication as “the sharing of meaning through the exchange ofinformation” (Castells, 2009, p54) and power as “exercised by means ofcoercion (or the possibility of it) and/or by construction of meaning” (idem,p10). Castells, M. 2009.

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(this has been the case since the concept of Fourth Estate and the powerof influence of mass media). We could argue that with the Information Agethe power structure can be also reversed, because information is moreaccessible and transparent and so the ordinary people can even“control the controller” (as the cases of “leaking” secret informationin USA demonstrated). The problem though is that social media areprivately owned by big corporations with a great economic andpolitical power that goes against the common good they want torepresent. So, even if the ‘big brother’ dystopian view of Orwellseems far from reality, the fact that the nature of most Westernsocial media is commercial (that means with the goal of profit) andthe fact that the private information is monitored by governments,challenge the ‘freedom potentiality’ of social media and thepossibility to build a real public sphere (as Morozov argues in hisfamous book The net delusion43). Obviously in the authoritarian regimes iseven worst as Internet is completely in the hands of the governments(like in the Chinese case that some scholars define as ‘networkedauthoritarianism’44) living few possibilities out of the control andthe censorship.

So in conclusion this paper argue that even if the network societyallows the people to participate to the creation of the meaningsaround their personal values and propositions (and not only around thevalues and proposition of the system) the public sphere is somethingstill far from being completely realized even with social media. Aswell as the social capital is not something that can born only withthe presence of social media (even if they can help to increase hispresence) as it needs a culture based on collaboration and solidaritymore than fragmentation and invidualism in order to exist. So ifsocial media, as every media, reproduce the exclusions already presentin the society or the inclusion and social capital of the community,but cannot radically change them, what are the consequences of theiruse? The consequences are that if post-modern Western societies are43 Morozov, E. 2012. The net delusion. The dark side of Internet freedom. Public Affairs. 44 MacKinnon R. 2012. China’s networked authoritarianism. In Diamond L., Plattner M. 2012. Liberation technology. Social media and the struggle for democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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liquid and disaggregated they will maintain and possibly expand thisfragmentation. If Western societies are more individualistic than theEastern ones they will not increase their social bonds only because ofthe use of social media. As well as if a country has no politicizationof the people against the regime or not much social capital in itsfabric social media will not create this political request or thestructural change in that society. At the same time though socialmedia will increase the ‘possibility’ of creating a public sphere, notbuilding it directly but opening a space for it and training thecitizens to a more complete civic sense. Meanwhile this could improveindirectly also the social capital if already present, because to bemore active in the society means to create more solidarity with thecommunity, as the social action cannot be only individual but needsnetworks and connections. Therefore social media cannot build socialcapital or public sphere by themselves but they can facilitate theirconstruction by the people, so indirectly influencing also a realsocial change. This is their role and this is what they have beendoing until now. And if we look at the results around the world, fromTunisia to China and to Italy, it seems that they are making it quitegood.

Tunisia today: social media increasing social capital?

Tunisia has been the center of world attention, for what laterwould have been known as the Arab Spring, since the end of 2010. Therevolutions of Arab Spring, as we know, have been defined at thebeginning as the ‘social media revolutions’, while with some deeperanalysis we realized that even if social media ‘fostered’ therevolutions or even ‘facilitated’ their organization they didn’t‘make’ them. The revolution in Tunisia was pushed by the needs of theyoung people that had their two slogans in the words Karama (dignity)and Hurria (freedom), the two rights that were missing in their life.The revolution was caused by the economic crisis, which madeimpossible the life of the youth, especially the college graduatesthat remained unemployed for years and decided finally to lead arevolt (replacing the traditional leadership as the driving force).

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The revolution was made by the actions of occupying the squares andfacing the repression (as the ‘propaganda of the deeds’ or Harendtwould have predict) but at the same time also by the ‘mental change’needed to pass from the fear to the anger (Neuman and MacKuen, 2007).And finally the revolution was also helped by the strong cyberactivismculture of the youth, who was able to criticize the regime for severalyears, and by a relatively high diffusion of Internet in the Tunisiansociety respect to other Arab or African countries (Castells, 2012).It was helped by social media both in the process of ‘emotionalcoalescence’ and in the creation of a ‘choreographical’ leadership,allowing a traditional society based on hierarchical leaderships touse instead a horizontal leadership to topple down the regime(Gerbaudo, 2012). So we can say that social media in the case ofTunisian revolution played a quite important role, but they didn’tcause or made the revolution: the revolution was caused by the need ofa regime change felt by the population (in particular the youth part)and realized thanks to the strong social bonds present in the society,that pushed the youth to connect and become a force of change.

This short chapter is not focusing however neither on the use ofsocial media during the revolution, as many scholars already analyzedit nor on the role of social media in the democratic transition inTunisia after the revolution (even if it would be interesting giventhe good results of this transition, at least respect to othercountries of the Arab Spring). This chapter analyzes the possible usesof social media in Tunisia today, in particular in the rural areas ofthe country where the revolution started. The researcher is interestedin seeing how the youth population is using today the social media,which is the level of social capital that they have in theircommunity, and what is the role of social media in empowering theircivic sense and citizenship. This taking the case of Menzel Bouzaieneas an emblematic example that the researcher know directly, havingstudied this case for few weeks in Tunisia during the summer of 2013.

The Tunisian youth of rural areas represent a big part of thepopulation that is still cut out of the modern technologicalrevolution. These remote provincial areas didn’t participate much inthe past to the exchange of information and communication as they

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didn’t have neither the infrastructure nor the human capital to do it(access and usage exclusion were both present, as Papacharissi wouldsay). But it is exactly in these areas that the revolution started andspread to all Tunisia because these were the places most affected bythe economic and social problems. In particular the town of MenzelBouzaiene, in the Sidi Bouzid region, was cut out from the Internetuntil 2010 and its socio-economic situation before the revolution wasquite disastrous: in 2010 the unemployment rate was more than 40% andthe illiteracy rate more than 70%. After the revolution this situationdidn’t change much, being this area still one of the poorest regionsof Tunisia. What changed though was the ability of part of itspopulation to have access to the outside environment, gathering andsharing information with the rest of Tunisia and the rest of theworld, because of the new connectivity of the region. In 2010 themajority of the families were deprived from the use of the Internet ineducation and work (only 1% of the families had a computer at thattime) while today45 20% of the houses in Menzel Bouzaiene are connectedwith Internet, there are 20 ‘Publinet’ or Internet Cafes (out of 170in the whole country) and the youth of the region is finally incontact with the rest of the world.

But how the youth of this region is using now Internet and whatis the role of social media in training their skills of digitalcitizenship and reinforce their potential for social change? A localNGO called ACCUN (Association for Digital Citizenship and Culture) played animportant part in the digital and civic development of the area. Thisorganization, born soon after the revolution following expressly the‘stigmergy’ philosophy of action, aims to disseminate the digitalculture among the youth and strengthen their participation in thelocal governance. To do this, a part using a web site and a center forthe digital operations, this association focus on organizing trainingsabout citizen, civic, community and collaborative journalism, inparticular with the creation of video clips and web sites.46 Many45 http://www.sidibouzidnews.org/menzel-bouzaiane-village-connecte/ 46One interesting project for example, funded with the help of an ItalianNGOs, is called “Peripherie Active”. It supports local civil society in itsability to do networking for the inclusion of the demands of vulnerablepopulation. See on this: https://www.facebook.com/pages/P%C3%A9riph%C3%A9rie-Active-Accun-Gvc-Ya-Bastaue-TUNISIE/292845414076651

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people know already that ‘citizen journalism’ is a journalism in whichcommon citizens collect, analyze and report news and information butnot many people may know the meaning of the other types of journalism.‘Community journalism’ is the coverage of our local communities, ourneighborhoods or even our small towns; the ‘civic journalism’ imply ademocratic process as media not only inform but aim to engage citizensin public debates; and finally ‘collaborative journalism’ requiresthat more reporters contribute to a news story together. So with ACCUNyoung people of Menzel Bouzaiene started to experiment all these typeof journalism, as together they became citizen journalists, discussingtheir problems, increasing the local awareness and bringing theirdemands to the local administrators. In three years the youth of thevillage cooperated in many projects, helping each other’s in therealization of videos for community purposes, organizing Hackerfestival or filling political petitions (and even creating a communalradio for the citizens). This was possible, like in the revolution,also because of the propensity of the people to collaborate, more thancompete, among themselves and to create connections inside and outsidetheir personal groups. In few words to ‘build a stronger socialcapital’, something already present in Tunisian society, as in mostlyof the Mediterranean societies, but something that still have thepotentiality to grow. Therefore looking at the example of the youth ofMenzel Bouzaienne we can say that as the use of social media wasfunctional in the Tunisian revolution a new use of it is nowfunctional in the empowerment of rural youth. Social media areincreasing both the bonding type of social capital (Boase, Wellman,2005) with the empowerment of groups already formed and the bridgingone (Ellison, Lampe, Steinfield and Vitak, 2010) with the creation ofnew groups with different interests but looking at common actions forcommon goals. This process shows how social media can magnify what itis already in a society, like a good level of social capital as in theTunisian rural society, that is a society not fragmented but ratherunited (the polarization between secular and Islamists is more presentin the urban areas for example). And it also demonstrates how socialmedia and social capital are interconnected in a virtuous relation ofreciprocal influence in which the expansion of one increase in turnalso the expansion of the other.

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So, as we see, not every society use social media in the same waybut every society can make of them the best use if they want, thatmeans making them functional to their needs and useful to theiractions. This is what Tunisian rural young society has been doing andthis is what youth of other societies have also done with socialmedia. Let’s see now the Chinese case and how the new media affectedthe creation of another important element for social change: thepotential public sphere.

China today: social media opening space for a potential public sphere?

The reflections we do in the Western world about social media andsocial movements in China are often associated with censorship,repression and lack of freedom. China is one of the five countries onReporters without Borders’ list of “State Enemies of the Internet”47 in2013 and China’s “Great Firewall”48 is probably the best repressionsystem in the world for controlling Internet users. Nevertheless, evenif the use of SNS for mobilizations purposes is clearly limited by thestate, there are possibilities for the netizens to go around censorshipand filters, like the use of “social steganography”49 or thesubstitution of banned characters with others that have unrelatedmeanings but sound alike or look similar (thanks to the Chineselanguage that offers these possible evasions)50. The problem though isthat, beside the repression, China is using another intelligent way to

47 China, Syria, Iran and North Korea have their governments involved inintrusive surveillance of news providers, resulting in grave violations offreedom of information. From: http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/china/48 Great Firewall of China is a project operated by the Ministry of Public Securitydivision of the government of China, which began operations in November 2003.Beside the normal control of IP addresses or domain name it makes large-scaleuse of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to block access based on keyworddetection.49 Social stenography (hiding information creating a message that cannot beunderstood) is used on the web to post events with different images respect tothe originals without explanation so they can get through the filters. See:http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/how-the-chinese-internet-remembers-tiananmen-on-its-24th-ann50 See on this: How to get censored on China’s Twitter, ProPublica, 11/14/2013. From:http://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-get-censored-on-chinas-twitter

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control communication, in order to avoid the so called “dictator’s” or“conservative” dilemma51. According to this dilemma if a governmentshuts down Internet access it would obviously risk radicalizingcitizens’ attitude or harming the economy. As Zuckerman’s Cute Cat theory52

argues too, it is dangerous to block a platform broadly used forenjoyment communication (that is also usually used for politicalactivism) as people will protest, trying to find a way to have their‘cute cats’ (since Latin time: panem et circenses). How did China solvethese problems? They created their own social media: Weibo, Renren, andYouku, that are the alternative platforms to the Americans Twitter,Facebook and YouTube. Chinese government didn’t block social medialike Mubarak or Ben Ali, instead it created alternative ones, in orderto allow the networking and enjoyment but limit their use in socialand political movements (as the servers are in China and so can becontrolled). This short chapter doesn’t analyze however the level ofsurveillance in China, also given the fact that the 2013 ‘masssurveillance disclosures’ made by Edward Snowden, showed how Westernsurveillance might be not so different, at least in its effects, fromthe actions of China’s SkyNet team (the Chinese Internet police). Thechapter instead analyzes how social media reproduce values and needsof the Chinese society and multiply the actions already present insidethis society, with the possible effects on the creation of a newpotential public sphere.

Unfortunately there are not many books written by Chinesescholars on these topics but one of the exceptions is a recent book53

on how Web 2.0 influence civil society and its demands in East Asia.In the chapter on China the author, Hu Yong54, argues how China’s“harmonious society” is living a more or less socially stable period51 This dilemma is defined by the media theorist Asa Briggs : if a government shut down Internet access or ban cell phones it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy. See: Shirky, C. 2011. The political power of social media: technology, the public sphere and political change. Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2011. 52 Cute Cat theory (“cute cats” is used for any low-value but popular onlineactivity) was developed by Ethan Zuckerman in 2008. From:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/ 53 Ip Iam Chong, 2011. “Social Media Uprising in Chinese-speaking world”, Kindle version 54 Professor at Peking University's School of Journalism and Communication

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since the repression of Tiananmen in 1989 and the reasons are similarto the ones that maintain stability in Western developed democracies:economic security and political legitimacy. But probably social mediaare opening a new space for a ‘virtual sphere’ where some sort ofprotest culture and freedom of assembly could be revitalized again, asthe Internet allowed Chinese netizens to become what has been defined“the biggest NGO in the world”55. The blogger Michael Anti for exampleargues that the “Chinese bloggers are in fact creating the firstnational public sphere in the country’s history”56. We don’t have muchstatistics on the Internet users (gender, class, ethnicity etc.) tosee if this is something even close to a potential public sphere butthe mere fact of having 300 million microbloggers using Weibo in Chinatoday, is really something significant. But is this what Papacharissiwould call “private sphere”, that increase participation andsociality, what Hardt and Negri define “new commons”, with collectivepotentialities and economic value, or what Castells would callnetworked society, with multidirected communication and the potentiality toempower democracy? May be, but it is important to know deeply asociety, with its culture and its history, before to analyze what anew form of media can bring to the traditional organization and valuesof that society.

The mobilization that accompanied the booming of social media inChina for example has been defined mostly as a local “ordinaryresistance”57 instead of a global “dissident resistance” (that is moreconfrontational with the political system). There are many cases ofbloggers increasing awareness on local issues through Weibo but notmany confronting the regime. Is this because who does it go directlyto jail, as the few that did it already? Could be, but maybe there are55 The number of netizens in China was 457 million in 2010. See “The 27thStatistical Report on the Development of Chinese Internet.” China Internet NetworkInformation Center (CNNIC). 01/19/11. 56 Fromhttp://www.ted.com/talks/michael_anti_behind_the_great_firewall_of_china.html57 One example are the anticorruption protests after the earthquake in Sichuanin 2008. “Ordinary resistance” can be defined as “small, localized andisolated cases that lack ideological and organizational affiliations requiredfor linking them together”. See: Perry, E. J. and Selden, M. 2003. “Introduction:Reform and Resistance in Contemporary China.” Chinese Society, Change, Conflict andResistance, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. P. 17

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other reasons too that we can analyze if we look at the history ofsocial demands in China. In fact, in the past, the petitioner system wasthe Chinese system that allowed the citizens to do requests to theirgovernment, who had to hear complaints and grievances from thecitizens. Today the petitioner system is living a new phase with Internet,as there are in China millions of individual actions of petition thatgo to the central government against social injustice, and theseactions are also spread in the local and national communities thanksto Internet and microblogging. In this way the isolated cases ofprotests are transformed in public events and this is good for thepublic support but at the same time is also functional to the Chinesegovernment (as the old petition system, with many people going to Beijingto bring their demands, would have create a high risk ofdemonstrations in the capital). So as noted by Yiyi Lu58 these onlineactions allow protesters to reach the local authorities and at thesame time be successful in obtaining their goals, through gatheringpublic support online instead of in the streets. This is also possiblebecause the servers of social media are in Bejing so the localauthorities cannot track the data of the local microbloggers (the riskof big brother dread by Morozov is constrained in this case thanks toa decentralized use of social media and a centralized control).

These actions of ‘online petitions’, even though have not a realsense of political dissidence and probably cannot be transformed inlarge-scale social movements, nevertheless have the power to shakepublic opinion on local issues, increasing the debate on politicalquestions, and this is what Internet can do in China right now. It cancreate a virtual space not for a potential regime change (at least fornow) but for a potential public sphere, as imagined by Habermas, inwhich people debate on common issues and propose common solutions.This is also what Xiao Qiang (founder of China Digital Times) believe ishappening in China today: the creation of a ‘popular opinion’ with the

58 Lu, Yiyi. 2010. “Chinese Protest in the Age of the Internet.” China Real Time Report.The Wall Street Journal, 14 Dec. 2010. From:http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/12/14/chinese-protest-in-the-age-of-the-internet

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rise of an autonomous ‘quasi-public space’ where social and politicalquestions can be discussed59.

This shows also how social media reflects the values of asociety: if the Chinese society still accept to have a one partysystem because their cultural interpretation of democracy is differentfrom Western societies or because of their nationalism and Confucianvalues or because of any other reason, this will not be changed by aninternet tool. Until there will be not enough need of political changein the population the kind of “dissident resistance” will remainsporadic, while the “ordinary resistance” will keep growing. This willhelp to start probably a new phase for Chinese public opinion andsocial mobilization. So, presumably, the future of China’s transitionwill not be a revolutionary regime change like in Arab Spring on inEastern Europe, but a more conscious gradual transition towards makingthe people’s voice more heard through the new channels in the longrun60. At least until another demonstration like Tiananmen Squareprotests will tell us the opposite.

Italy today: social media facilitating participatory democracy?

The freedom of the press in Italy is the lowest of the WesternEurope, also because of the 20 years of the Berlusconi era, affectedby the media tycoon that controlled the majority of the public andprivate media in Italy. In its 2013 report, Freedom House listed Italystill as “partly free” country and ranked the nation 68th in the worldtogether with Guyana. Nevertheless, and probably because of that, thesocial media use is on the rise: in 2012 the percentage of populationusing Facebook in Italy raised to 40%61 while the number of Internetusers was around 60%62 and 60% of the families had a personal

59 Diamond L., Plattner M. 2012. Liberation technology. Social media and the struggle for democracy. JHU Press.60 See on this Clay Shirky, 2011. The political power of social media: technology, the publicsphere and political change. Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2011. 61 From: http://businessculture.org/southern-europe/business-culture-in-italy/social-media-guide-for-italy/62 From : International Telecommunications Union, 2012.

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computer63. Who understood well and early the importance of Internetpenetration in the formation of Italian public opinion has been acomedian, Beppe Grillo, who started in 2005 a social-politicalmovement through the use of local Meetups (following the 2003 campaignfor the primaries of the Democratic Party in the US). Today hismovement, the 5 Star Movement (5SM), is probably the most powerfulsocial-political movement in the world born on the Internet platform.Following the Arab Spring in North Africa and Occupy movement in theUS, the 5SM became in 2013 one of the three main political parties inItalian parliament, reaching its goal of de-stabilize the party-basedstatus quo. For this they used a new (even if old too) way of socialand political change: start with demonstrations and protests but thengo to politics, build a ‘party’ and enter the national Parliament withofficially elected citizens, using mostly Internet propaganda andorganization. How did they arrive at this point only with a blog, afamous comedian leading them and an economic crisis that found in thevote of protest, instead of a rebellion, his way out?

First of all we need to explain something more about the 5SM.This is an environmentalist, Eurosceptic, antiestablishment ‘party-movement’ that advocates for more participatory democracy trying todestroy the partitocracy (a term that indicate in Italian the hijackingof institutions by the party politics) and give power again to thecitizens (not only sending some of them directly to the parliament butmaking them participating to the online proposition of the new laws).This is a new thing in Italian politics but is still tied to theability to use Internet and to the interest of the population toparticipate to the legislation, that not always is present, inparticular in the old Italian population. The 5SM refuses the title ofpolitical party has it doesn’t have a party structure and its founderand president is not a professional politician but a comedian thatguide the elected from his home and his blog. Beppe Grillo for manyyears conducted his shows against bad politics and politicians in thetheaters of Italy and finally entered in politics when he metGianroberto Casaleggio, an online marketing expert who believed in the‘Internet centrism’, to say it with Morozov. Grillo and Casaleggio are

63 From : National Institute of Statistics, 2012.

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today accused of populism, extremism and lack of internal democracy inthe party and probably they are right criticisms64. But this shortfinal chapter will not analyze the politics behind this ‘party-movement’, looking instead at how the 5SM used the Italian socialfabric and the communication power of the net to reach this level ofpower. The question to ask in the Italian case is: how the Italiansocial capital and the use of the social media, affected the evolutionof the 5SM? Obviously without the social, political, economic andmoral crisis that lived Italy in the last 20 years the 5SM could notreach this level of support from the population, but the researcherbelieves that the presence of social capital in the Italian community,and the potential public sphere created with the blog and the Meetups,represented two important elements on this path.

The core of the 5SM is represented by a network of motivatedactivists and citizens who worked for many years on popular causeslike anti-nuclear campaigns, renewable energy, cuts to the politicalcosts etc. These activists often were coming also from experiences inlocal cooperatives and associations of citizenship and civicengagements. These are the typical organizations of Italian society(the type of networks that Putnam defined as the base of socialcapital65) in particular in the center and north of the peninsula,where solidarity helped the creation of mutual aid associations andcooperatives. Unfortunately the political parties could not answer totheir demands, apart from the Communist Party that functioned often asthe sounding board of their requests but who had been almost alwaysout of the national governments. What Grillo and Casaleggio did thanwas to use the presence of these local political activism andchannelize it through the use of Internet. This activism was already

64 Also given the fact that Grillo and Casaleggio are the only guides of theparty-movement and the more than one thousand Meetups are not much democraticas are guided by who founded them and pay for them every month.See on this the analysis of Giovanni Tiso : Tiso, G. The net will save us. Overland.Winter2013, Issue 211, p55-60.65 See on this: Putnam, R. 1993. Making democracy work: civic traditions in modern Italy.Princeton University Press. Putnam explains how the lack of social capital inthe south of Italy and its presence in the north made the new regionalinstitutions to have different levels of efficiency and so different level ofdemocracy.

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present in the social fabric of Italy and this is why a party-movementlike 5SM could growth in short time as it could take the strength ofthe national social capital and put it at the service of a high valuethat is the administration of the country.

The other element that helped the party-movement to reach thissuccess has been the internet, which became the tool that the citizensused to protest against the authoritarianism of Berlusconi for severalyears. The Internet was the powerful instrument that 5SM used as aplatform in which the people met, organized and discussed beforelocal, and then national, political propositions. The blog of the 5SMrepresented a strong medium for the organization of this ‘party-movement’, and a potential public sphere on Internet, where everyonecould participate if it had a connection and some ability to use it.Obviously besides the virtual public sphere, as we said earlier, alsothe physical public sphere was important, with the face to facecontact as a basic glue that reinforced the groups for common actions.This is why the Meetups were so crucial, representing open spaces whereeven if the hierarchy was still there everyone could participate, to“have fun, get together and share ideas and proposals for a betterworld, starting from their own city”66.

Finally we have to say that obviously to get 25% of the votes weneed to involve a much broader public than just a community ofactivists and engaged netizens, in particular in a country where thepopulation is quite old and not always used to the use of Internet.For this reason the role of Grillo, the comedian that was able togather dozens of thousands of people during his speeches in theItalian squares, was fundamental in order to spread the new messageand the desire to de-stabilize the establishment to a wide audience.So we can say that social media and Internet played a very importantrole in the organization and participation of the people to the‘party-movement’, even if the potential public sphere would have not

66 Beppe grillo interviewed in Grillini in movimento – Micromega online. 04/20/2012 From: http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/grillini-in-movimento/?printpage=undefined

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been enough without the social capital, already present since longtime in the Italian society.67

We don’t know what will be the future of Italy in this transitionafter 20 years of Berlusconism. The center-left Democratic Partyunderstood that had to pass a complete renovation besides to accept tostill govern with Berlusconi’s party if they wanted to avoid thedestruction of the 5SM. The party chose a young president, MatteoRenzi, the mayor of Florence, a 39 years old smart and photogenic heirof the old Christian Democracy, who became the new Italian PrimeMinister in 2014. The future of Italian democracy is not clear but onething is certain: the Italian politics are not the same anymore as theold parties had to accept more participation from the citizens andmore transparency in their actions, because a party-movement, borninside the Italian social capital and grown in the online publicsphere, has changed the approach to democracy in Italy. And this willbenefit not only Italian democracy but in general the representativedemocratic system that is feeling the weight of the years in the oldWestern democracies.

67 Hartleb, F. 2013. Anti-elitist cyber parties. Journal of Public Affairs. Nov2013, Vol. 13 Issue 4, p355-369.

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Conclusions

In this paper the researcher attempted to show how social mediacan influence social change facilitating the creation of a potentialpublic sphere and reinforcing the level of social capital. This workalso analyzed how different societies, with their diverse features andvalues, influence the use of social media for their own purposes. Theresults in the comparative analysis are that social change happens(either through a revolution or an electoral process) if the societyis ripe for that change. Social media can help in opening a potentialpublic sphere, strengthening the level of social capital andincreasing political activism to promote change. Social media act astool for training citizenship but they are not able to change theneeds, goals and desires of a population. They cannot challenge thestatus quo unless this it is a real need of the people. So we cannotdirectly transfer their effects from a society to another one: ArabSpring was a peculiar phenomenon as 5SM or the petitioning system. Theuse of social media is a reflection of the society not the other wayaround. Technology can influence society but not completelyrevolutionize it.

As we saw the direct action and the ‘emotional coalescence’behind it are important factors in social change even if social mediadon’t create them by themselves. If a society is politicized andpeople demonstrate on the street for a change, the time spent behind ascreen will complement and sometimes even reinforce the actual timepassed physically together, like during Arab Spring. If a society isnot politicized or present its demand in a different way to thegovernment (like the case of petitioner system in China) social mediawill not change it bringing the people to the streets or making themopposing the regime, but they will reinforce and empower in some waythe political and social requests of the people. Finally if a societyis politicized but exhausted by the partiality of traditional mediaand the lack of participatory democracy, like in Italy, thecommunities can find in the new social media a way to express theirstrong social capital and increase the direct participation in thepolitical arena.

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If we compare Arab Spring, China status quo and Italy ‘onlineparty-movement’, we see how social media had, at least until now,different effects, not only because of the different control,censorship or access to the Internet, but because of the of thepeculiar situation in the different societies, their differentcultures and economic situations and their different level of socialcapital. Social media open space for a real change only if that isalready a request of the population. They can help in redirectingsocial capital towards more concrete actions like blogging, citizenjournalism or even an ‘online party movement’ only if the socialcapital is already there. And social media can also expand thepossible public sphere of every society (like Hardt, Negri,Papacharissi and Castells argue) allowing citizens to train in debateand self-expression, and so empowering them in a process ofautonomyzation and new narration. But every society has different useof that potential public sphere, and if a society use it for arevolution, or a more gradual expression of grievances, or thecreation of an ‘online party-movement’, this depend by the societyitself.

Social media can potentiate and magnify citizens’ needs anddemands, even if they cannot change them. Like printing led us to amore democratic modernity, the Internet is guiding us to a moredemocratic post-modernity, and this can increase our freedom andempower our society. Whatever type of society is and whateverdefinition of democracy has.

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