London.
The penultimate speaker at Transforming Audiences is Emiliana de Blasio, who shifts our attention to Italy and begins by questioning the optimistic rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0. Political participation using social media depends on three steps: access, interaction, and participation. In this, access 1.0 is simply access to information, access 1.1 is access to relatively open mass media; and only access 2.0 is an opportunity to have one's own produced content published or broadcast. This requires the skills to receive content and provide feedback, and takes place in the context of a networked individualism which replaces other types of social formations.
The present study examined Italian user-generated content on a number of levels, and found a growth of networked individualism, a growth of involvement with impact on civic attention and engagement, and a growth of networking that is likely to increase social participation (but mainly in users who already had political and social interests).
Four functions for political uses of social networking can be identified here: information, fundraising, involvement, and mobilisation (for representation, belonging, and action). Emiliana now notes a number of examples here, YouDem.tv, as well as uses of Facebook by Italian political movements.
Access, then, may enable social curiosity and symbolic involvement, interaction may enable information exchanges, representational belonging, and civic attention, participation may enable information production, social engagement, community belonging, and political participation.
