Italian blogs and social networks sites, or rather the history and stories told from below
Leaving the field of scientific research, we enter the most complex field of public use in history. What space does history occupy in Italian civil society? How and by whom is it told on the Internet?
Immediately you notice that almost all the main events of contemporary history have their own site (eg. First and Second World War, Cold War, etc. ...). In all cases, it is a story in which the eventual prevails, understood as a mere collection of data without interpretative reflection. This confirms the pre-eminent role of the net as a means of finding information since, even where a debate is opened in the few sites that provide the possibility of comment, the tendency is to discuss politics rather than history.
More space for historiographic discourse can be found in blogs that are, however, few in number and little frequented; their main purpose is to keep alive the memory of the Italian public on events and historical figures judged relevant from time to time. It is worth reflecting on the fact that Italian blogs on the subject are held not so much by historians as by journalists.
Moving on to social networks, we immediately notice that, although Twitter offers more potential for historical storytelling - Alwyn Collinson's ambitious project on the Second World War is emblematic: Facebook is certainly the most widely used social network in Italy (20.9 million accounts compared to 2 million Twitter: Audiweb data, January 2012).
But where is the story on Facebook? Usually, on the official pages of the great characters: from Garibaldi to Mazzini, from Vittorio Emanuele II to Benito Mussolini, each of them has at least one dedicated public page. Also, in this case, it is clear how communication tends to be based on the mechanism of identification/opposition to a character, an event, a period of history. The field of knowledge goes into the background and the reading of history succumbs once again to the political debate; the comments, few in number, attest to a modest level of cultural depth and on them prevails the action of raising the thumb or share what in a given moment meets the consensus.
Claudia Covelli's reflection on the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy as the first celebration in which the new media competed for traditional communication was based on these identification mechanisms typical of Facebook. The quantitative survey showed that the most cited historical figures were Giuseppe Garibaldi and Carlo Cattaneo since it shows how political reading has still prevailed over historical reading since in 2011 the debate on federalism was very heated and the characters ended up embodying two different ideas of the nation. Another interesting indicator is the fact that the pages dedicated to the celebrations often shifted the attention to characters far from the history of the Risorgimento, indicating as national heroes protagonists of contemporary life such as the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino.
Conclusions
The research, still at an early stage, has allowed identifying some representations of the past as they appear in the sites. It is preliminary work, an excavation done with a raw tool, but essential for any future study on the subject. The way is open to further investigation.