Abstract
This chapter traces the origin of the defining characteristics of the citizen user in parallel to the significant decline of trust towards public and private institutions observed in Western democracies since the turn of the millennium. I explain the political, cultural and economic reasons of this decline: although citizens’ trust has cyclically fluctuated, in the 2000s a sense of civic disempowerment was for the first time coupled with information and communication empowerment driven by the massification of Internet technologies. This synchronicity defined the contours of the demand for political re-empowerment based on what I describe as Internet-mediated citizenship made possible by three revolution: an Internet revolution, a mobile revolution and a software revolution.
I believe that we’re entering an era when software will fundamentally transform almost everything we do. The continued growth of processing power, storage, networking, and graphics is making it possible to create almost any device imaginable. But it’s the magic of software that will connect these devices into a seamless whole, making them an indispensable part of our everyday lives.
—Bill Gates (2004)
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Notes
- 1.
As for most comments sections, the number of total comments was visible for each blogpost published on beppegrillo.it. Based on data collected by the author, 5.2 million comments were posted to 10,599 blogposts published on beppegrillo.it between 2005 and 2016.
- 2.
According to Audiweb (2009, 2013), larepubblica.it averaged 1,091,544 daily viewers in 2009 and 1,631,247 in February 2013, corriere.it 873,233 in 2009 and 1,415,444 in 2013. Based on the author estimates, beppegrillo.it averaged 419,000 viewers in June 2009 and 872,000 in February 2013.
- 3.
In 2005, in the biographic page of Grillo’s blog we could read that he self-declared himself as “the most popular Italian comedian” (Grillo, 2005a).
- 4.
- 5.
“Mani Pulite ” and “Tangentopoli” are mentioned in 144 blog posts between 2005 and 2016.
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Bailo, F. (2020). The Emergence of the Citizen User. In: Online Communities and Crowds in the Rise of the Five Star Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45508-8_2
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