Nicky Vendola, the Italian Obama and the digital politics: for a new culture of the political communication

An initial definiton of the concepts of “culture”,”politics” and “communication” makes easier the comprehension of this text.

Culture: That cluster of material and immaterial objects, a constitutive part of a group, and that, somehow, makes us possibile to spot it, in its specificity and difference. One of its strategical factors is a changeover that matures both at an individual and a collective level. For this reason we can speak of processing identities, changeable, never settled and defined once and for all. Multiple identities because they're crossed by colloquial productions formulated in social fields that only temporarily close an individual experience in a partial definition of the ego.

The history of the migrations from Australopithecus onwards helps us to understand why the borders amid cultures are never defined once and for all. Cultures, as cultural identities, are in motion, are historical and processing entities. As well as the borders amid States, amid the political geograpies of nations, have been made definitely permeable by the globalized communication's nets in the Twentieth Century.

“The global village”, an expression several times used by Marshall McLuhan describes well the power of communication technologies to determine the collective and individual imaginary, their ineluctable effects on the worlds of daily life. And this independently from the contents and from the information they transmit.

But communication is not a modernity's invention, it's typical of mankind. Symbolic communication, culture, are its most remarkable ingredients that gives a shape and a matter to it.

Politics. Or rather politics in a plural way: the activation of processes that make possible - or rather they should make possible - to give answers to problems of collective importance. But politics, communication are a part of culture, as a matter of fact. Therefore, when I speak about politics and culture I can better say culture of communicational politics if I mean, for example, to concern about new and old modalities of making a political speech. Because popes and kings, politicians and petty ones, have always made use of media.

Only to mention an example, a king's effigy on a coin was flowing communicational and economical power, told and divulged by one of the most powerful instruments of power itself: money. But to speak about communicational and cultural politics also means to focus on the interlacement amid three terms, three elements, because it's impossible to prescind from communication, anyway.

Amid the agents of primary socialization, as we know, media have had, from the Fifties onwards, a strategic role to divulge culture, information, education and political competition. In the relation between political power and mass-media, you can say for sure that a leader's political communication assumes a pivotal role but that it's also structured on a top-down communicative model. It's a vertical and a generalist word irradiated from the center – the center of political powers - to the suburbs. Here, communication is the word's vertical power and no more to share, an horizontal sharing of the word itself.

A verticality that, from the Eighties onwards, has had a good hand with the accession of commercial (private) tvs, has cleared a neoliberal culture made in Italy and has fed - altering it – every millimetre of our mind-body. It has fed our mental representations, the categories that orient our daily life's recognizability, that nourish our collective and individual imaginary, our common feeling.

In this way it's matured the transition from a project of a possible society to a solitary rush of every “ego” that has removed from his/her familiar lexicon terms like “solidarity”, “sharing”, “cohesion of the political action”, in an individual and collective project of life: everything is cash, in its mental and physical shape, material and symbolic.

These are drifts and worrying landings that are overbearingly imposing themselves to our glances in the circularity between private televisions, talkshows and “puppet theatres of politics”: it's the victory of a new and generalized, reifying culture of the body, of compere's assistans girls and career escorts. The final user's triumph. The manager's style has erased every form of interventionism in market economy, inaugurating an unprecedented “Res Publica”: it has interlaced power, sex, politics in “unpublished” recruitment drives in Parliament for new and extemporized government coalitions.

New media have raised the challenge for a new and different communicational politics, in the age of digitized contents, that doesn't speak to the masses, but about the subject in his/her peculiarity and specificity, about the centrality of his/her beginning to speak that is not competition or a conquest of places of power, but creation of new spaces: the virtual squares, for generative politics of another future.

Then, the word's digitizing becomes an individual/collective body and space of experience meant to be, in the colloquial path of daily life and politics' virtual worlds, - each of them, in their specificity and difference - unity and multiplicity.

Social networks have put forward a political and communicative competence completely different from those we used to know till now. It overturns that word's verticality able to enlarge the gap between tops and bottom. New media's communicational politics becomes a singular and a plural body. It inaugurates a new category: digital democracy, widespread, pervasive, including: it's the space of many voices that take part, and by full right, to politics' colloquial practices but completely out of parties' asphyxiated rooms.

Therefore, compared with the fragmentation and dissolution of community's traditional places and forms (- family, crowd and party) and that many people have noticed, social networks are feeding unexpected and heterogeneous models of aggregation, new and unforeseeable political sensibilities in the young types of use.

It could be useful to start with a consideration about modalities of aggregation, about friendly relationships that feed on theirselves, take shape and spread beginning with individual and shared requirements. There are profiles, groups and pages that count hundreds and also thousands of subscribers. The content of these messages is clear, short and direct: synthesized in few and essential words: for example “No to racism”, or “No to Gelmini's Reform” and so on.

This ability to reach many people, immediately sharing essential and incisive messages, drives us to think that, maybe, the ways themselves of communication, thumping and “all in a click”, are suggesting a nother way of making politics to us: random. Swinging. And for this reason not organizable or enterable in community and politics' traditional ways of aggregation.

For this reason, a chat window, or a post one, is the place where everybody can show his/her own difference: an approval or a disapproval, a chaotic assembly of considerations, a redundant reiteration of messages; a discontinuous and dissonant choir that gives strength, legitimacy and an authoritative space to self-representation.

I'd like to end it with a consideration and a question. An organized control - absolute and “ex alto” - of politics that, as a matter of fact was possible in the most traditional pyramidal strcture of social and political organizations of the Twentieth Century, is barely practicable in the third Millennium.

Can party's ways of aggregation and participation accept this challenge today? Can the subversive and disordering ways of digitized political communication be a benchmark to remodel not only parties' bureaucratic structure but also a new form of digital democracy: participative and representative?

It's too early to give an exhaustive answer.