Dalle reti alla Rete: Internet e influenza personale

This study concerns the role of the Internet and of the (techno)social networks in the circulation of political-electoral information and in the processes of influencing political opinion during the Campaign for the 2006 general elections in Italy. The basic hypothesis is that online information, which can strengthen, integrate, replace the information produced by traditional media, reaches some Internet users who then become sources of information for people who don’t use this medium and for other Internet users characterized by a more generic and recreational use of the medium (through the same Internet and computer mediated communication systems -chat, email, forum, instant messaging, blog, etc.). On a theoretical level, this work is rooted in the path undertaken by the recent communication research: careful about the unnumbered everyday possibilities of integration between online and offline experiences, this recent research considers Internet as mature technology of social relation, as well as powerful database of information. This contemporary communication research rethinks the conceptual and methodological instruments developed in order to study “offline” realities, by verifying their descriptive and interpretative potential with the mediated sociality. In fact, our research finds some conceptual and methodological suggestions in the tradition of the studies on personal influence and social networks in the circulation of political-electoral information (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet, 1948, Katz, Lazarsfeld, 1955). This suggestions are the points of departure of other questions about the actuality of the two-step flow model of communication (developed in a very simple communication setting, characterized by a limited and privileged diffusion of the media) and about the mechanism of circulation of political-electoral information through Internet supported and immediate social networks.