POLITICAL CULTURES AND DIGITAL RHETORIC

Social network users are seen and treated as consumers, not primarily as citizens or even less likely as activists. The companies that own social networks are there to make money not politics. And just to remind us that the Net is not as equalitarian as people tend to think it is, we should note that not only the platforms used (Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks) are from Western companies, but also that the most popular contents shared are from Western cultures (musical or political alike, as we have just seen), giving us a distorted perception of the world we live in and actually reproducing power ratios amongst the different geo-political cultures at a global level. There are many marketing oriented analysis on the behaviour of internet users and the results are used by companies trying to sell us something. Every time we browse the internet to look for a hotel or a book or whatever else, we will soon after be bombarded by similar advertisements on our social networks or even e-mails. Every time we do something on internet, we live traces, and give companies or even the police if we are living in an authoritarian country, a pretty good idea of who we are, what we like, where we go, and with whom. Those digital traces give a potential analyst a pretty interesting insight on the type, frequency and kind of social interactions undertaken in a specific geographical zone and on their content. So much so that not only security agencies worldwide have started analyzing them, marketing companies have started exploiting them for economic purposes, but a new branch of the social sciences has started to affirm itself, called Computational Social Science31, on the assumption that we live in a life of networks and that the relationships, activities and contents of these networks are traceable and analyzable, making it possible to draw conclusions on these social experiences and meanings and, more generally, on social change as a whole. Indeed, as in any technological revolution, not only a wide array of new possibilities is offered to the population that has access to it, but also scholars are compelled to rethink their theories and categories in order to better understand and explain the world they live in. This also entails the necessity of fine tuning or even of abandoning altogether previous hypothesis. After an enthusiastic initial reaction to the disclosure of grass roots participation possibilities brought by the new media, we should -now that we have started to collect the data – start analyzing its actual effects. And read these effects not as the mere outcome of technology but, as sociologists are trained to do, as used according to the society, culture and habits they are embedded in.