Some say that Italy’s ruling class is just struggling to keep pace with the Internet revolution. “Italy’s political culture is far removed from new technology,” says Luca Conti, 34, a blogger in the coastal city of Senigallia. “They’re not even focused yet on how to control the Internet since they haven’t even figured out how to use it to their advantage.” Case in point: more than 100,000 people attended an anti-Berlusconi rally in Rome last month that was organized on Facebook, but the top opposition politicians snubbed the event. Conti says the country’s leaders — left, right and center — are still focused solely on reaching the public via TV and newspapers. And unlike the Internet, the movers and shakers of the old media are some very familiar faces.

What can I say? It’s disgusting – just spread the word and don’t let this people walk on your turf. Knowledge is power.

Some related links:
– other posts about italy
– a previous government’s attempt to stop italian bloggers
– [funny] berlusconi’s worst gaffes

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The IJIRE is the first peer-reviewed online journal, dedicated specifically to cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research on Internet Research Ethics. All disciplinary perspectives, from those in the arts and humanities, to the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, are reflected in the journal.

A little bit of background:

With the emergence of Internet use as a research locale and tool throughout the 1990s, researchers from disparate disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to humanities to the sciences, have found a new fertile ground for research opportunities that differ greatly from their traditional biomedical counterparts. As such, “populations,” locales, and spaces that had no corresponding physical environment became a focal point, or site of research activity. Human subjects protections questions then began to arise, across disciplines and over time: What about privacy? How is informed consent obtained? What about research on minors? What are “harms” in an online environment? Is this really human subjects work? More broadly, are the ethical obligations of researchers conducting research online somehow different from other forms of research ethics practices

So what is Internet Research Ethics?

As Internet Research Ethics has developed as its own field and discipline, additional questions have emerged: How do diverse methodological approaches result in distinctive ethical conflicts and, possibly, distinctive ethical resolutions? How do diverse cultural and legal traditions shape what are perceived as ethical conflicts and permissible resolutions? How do researchers collaborating across diverse ethical and legal domains recognize and resolve ethical issues in ways that recognize and incorporate often markedly different ethical understandings?