The Joker effect: how participatory culture may disrupt politics

Can participatory culture shape public opinion?

The 2008 presidential campaign in the United States was full of examples of parody used to spread a message of change and mobilize voters. But average citizens are also now more aware of the possibility to modify and circulate images and related messages also when it comes to protest against politicians.

A few weeks ago a photoshopped image of President Obama surfaced online depicting him as Heath Ledger's Joker, from the movie Batman. Later this image appeared on several posters in Los Angeles, accompanied by the word 'socialism' - raising several protests and accusation of racism in the media. After that, Flickr removed the picture from the author's account, (a student who claimed that the picture hadn't any political connotation): apparently it was due to copyright infringement but neither Time nor DC Comics appear to have filed the takedown notice.

This event has been analyzed by journalists and researchers in the US: some of them pointed out how this was the first time that user-generated content was used to produce an anti-Obama image that went viral online. Others highlighted how the combination of a disturbing image with the word 'socialism' created a political message, probably more faceted than expected by the anonymous author, as it had evoked danger, deception and even racial implications.

Now, the “Joker” image has crossed the ocean, arriving in Italy, a country where – as it's frequently been contended – society and culture have been mainly shaped by a politician, the controversial Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is a dominant media player. In addition to introducing commercial TV in Italy in the early 80s, Berlusconi owns three of the country's leading newspapers and several other media outlets. The only media Berlusconi arguably doesn't dominate is the Internet, which in Italy is still in state of emergence.

Participatory culture is a neologism that indicates the creation of some type of published media by private persons, a process highly enabled by the rise of web 2.0. This production of user-generated content is considered a potential way of participation and civic engagement.

So far, in Italy, participatory culture has been mainly used as a form of satire, the widely known examples being parodies of billboard ads.

Vincenzo Cosenza, an Italian specialist in social media strategy and PR, proposed his own experiment: he photoshopped a picture of the Italian Prime Minister using the same Joker theme and posted it at the end of August on his blog. “What would happen if a picture like that will spread on the Internet?”he asked his readers.

One of the main Italian experts in participatory culture, Professor Giovanni Boccia Artieri is quite sure it won't have the same impactas the Obama “Joker” did in the US: “There is no contrast – as it happens in the Obama case – but more of an overlap […] The Berlusconi-Joker image shows the ironic-iconic nature of a body that is already not “sacred” by (self) definition”. The Italian Prime Minister is in fact acknowledged as a politician that uses jokes and a playful attitude even in official international meetings (and it is something that he claims as a distinctive trait of his public figure): Boccia Artieri adds that, paradoxically, spreading that image would strengthen Berlusconi, rather than weaken him, as it happened in the past years with other ads during political campaigns.
The purpose of creating this image was not a political one in this case, too: “I did not tell famous journalists I know, only people who read my blog and follow me on social networks. I did it mostly to see what Flickr would have done, and also to test how communication and social media work in Italy.” says Cosenza, a well-known member of the Italian blogosphere and also a photographer.

Spreading a message on the web (let alone to mainstream media) anyway is not easy, especially in a country like Italy, far behind in the European ranking of regular Internet users, “a source of concern” as it is said in a European Commission's study.
What can participatory culture do? Quite surprisingly, participatory culture is likely to grow faster here than in other countries: that is one of the conclusions of a recent study showing that Europeans' social networking use is accelerating. According to the study, Italy is the country with the highest number of people who comment (25% of the users) and creates new content (23%).

The Berlusconi-Joker picture has started to circulate on blogs and and social networks, also used as profile picture on Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. The reactions of people varied, Cosenza explains: “Some people said that they wanted to use the picture but they were afraid, others wrote me because they want a t-shirt with that image on it. Maybe I should print posters”.

But while Cosenza's experiment has a pretty limited impact, it seems like someone else has had the very same thought: in the past few days dozens of black and white posters appeared in Milan and New York (where Berlusconi will attend an important UN meeting in a few days). They picture the Italian Prime Minister as “The Untouchable” in Brian De Palma's movie poster, instead of Al Capone – a reference ripe with political meaning to any Italian familiar with how the Prime Minister has used his mass media properties to wall himself off from political criticism or accountability. The main Italian newspapers have started to notice them and are now wondering who can be the author.

It has usually been said that every public act is also a political act. Even unwillingly, considering some of the examples above.

So the question pops up again: can participatory culture shape public opinion?

New media surfacing online are now used by citizens to produce content and to engage more people: this may start a process that can unexpectedly disrupt the consensus. This would be real news for the Italian media environment, too often defined as hopelessly predictable.