Urban mediactivism in web 3.0. case analysis: The city of Chieti

Abstract

The passage from the birth of the Web and the 3.0 has been signed by a series of technical innovations, which are the result of a new concept of sharing knowledge. 2.0 theorists speak about a new intelligence which is coordinated in real time on the Web and which generates a real mobilization of the users both in the virtual and the material realities (Ryan in Storia di Internet e il futuro digitale. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino, 2011). Paradigms are born in relation to this principle: Lovink’s Mediactivism, Castells’ Network affinities and Levy’s Collective Intelligence and Barabarasi’s model of Small Word aristocratic. The aim of this project is: to analyse the affinities networks which are related to the theme “città di Chieti”, which are the movements of discussion that are created by the network and to understand how the social sciences could study their social form, content and function. The research methodology used for the analysis is the lukering that is an invisible and not participant observation of the virtual communities in a period of time going from January 2014 to September 2014. The lukering is part of a range of analysis instruments called Digital Ethnography (Underberg and Zorn in Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, narrative and New Media. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2013; Kozinets in Netnography: Doing Ethnography Research On Line. Sage Pubns Ltd, London, 2010). All these three typologies of structure which have been analysed before reflect the «little aristocratic worlds» model described by Barabasi and the forms of mediactivism vary according to the structure of virtual teams and hubs are the elements that influence public opinion and the viral content of the group.