ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6 I explore the opportunity to engage in a more autonomous and large-scale mediation thanks to the internet. In 2011 the internet was relevant to a wide range of actions I observe in this chapter, divided into two groups: those fostering a more vertical relationship, and those enabling a more horizontal logic. Within these actions is the creation and use of websites, the use of social media – especially Facebook – the coordination of concerted actions on the web, and also the internet as a realm of dialogue and discussion. After observing these actions, the chapter asserts that the uses of the web favoured a more aggregative and individualistic type of participation as expressed in the diffusion of information. However, it is on the collaborative and more horizontal type of participation where the internet does not appear to be successful, due to a tendency to speak rather than to listen, to treat difference as a synonym of threat and, in the end, to narrow the scope of people to talk only to those who share the same beliefs and stances. Accordingly, I conclude that the use of the internet passed from holding a solidary will, to a position of cultivating ghettos of political identities unable to talk to each other without each harming the other, rendering further collaboration, and even discussion, impossible. Consequently, the uses of the internet for communicative practices appear, in this chapter, to be a trigger to an uncommoning process that caused the commons to burst.
