Andrea Vascellari

What’s going on in Italy? Here’s short snippet from one of my favorites Italian voices Luca De Biase:

Tomorrow, July 14th, some Italian bloggers will not write. They will protest against the Italian government that is issuing a series of new laws that could limit the freedom of expression online in Italy. There is a ning dedicated to the people that will protest: Diritto alla Rete. Read more here…

It’s impossible to limit the freedom of expression online. Period.

It’s full of examples of other countries and institutions that tried to get there and miserably failed.

Each action that aims at repress, restrain, suppress the web don’t do anything else but underlining the ignorance of who performs the action itself.

If on one hand I believe it’s right to defend freedom of expression on the other I think that tomorrow’s bloggers-strike is definitely old-school and totally inappropriate especially considering the nature of the protest.

Silence doesn’t do much today. Back in the days it was an effective weapon simple enough to be rapidly used by large groups of people. But today? 2009? With all the channels and micro-channels that could be used to make the voice of people heard at national level… the best idea is staying in silence?

What’s going on Italians? Com’on!

Today ‘the silence’ just plays the game of who wants to actually keep protests under a veil of silence.

Things could be much different if instead of keeping mouths shut everyone who has a voice (authoritative and non) would make it heard. A wave of information would be sculpted eternally in the long tail of Google.

How to make voices heard?

• Blog posts. Like the one I’m writing now.
• Podcasts. They could be even done live. Imagine a day-long online event with guests etc. discussing on the same topic ‘freed of expression’ + it could be even recorded and made available for free on iTunes to millions of people.
• Tweets. I’m sure you already hear about Twitter. If not, where have you been living lately?
• Photos & Videos. Flickr and Youtube just name a few.
• Social networks. Groups, pages, causes on… Facebook for example?!
• Tags. A simple tag like #freedom4ITA could be used to gather every single bit of content tweets, photos, videos, whatever is produced and created by people.
• etc. etc. etc.

I stop here, these were just few examples. There’s a countless number of ways to spread a message online today.

Actions like these can make a difference and have a high media impact. Not silence.

Andrea