Come il vento. Il capitale sociale online del movimento No Tav

The work of research I have conducted within the Sociology PhD (University of Verona) is focused on the twenty-five years struggle against High-Speed-Railway projects widely concerned, and aims at achieving the following cognitive aims: investigating the use (especially the one focused on protesting) that the activists do of the CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) and of the Internet; checking if and how much the relationship within the No Tav and the one between the No Tav and anybody external to the movement feature confidence and mutual aid (the two constituent aspects of the social capital); understanding how the various online consumption strategies of the No Tav can possibly have an influence on their processes which produce social capital (associative, generally including people/institutions), and viceversa. Therefore, it is an ethnographical research whose first exploratory phase ended in the spring 2013, after twenty individual, interactive, online and non-structured interviews with as many No Tav screened through convenience sampling, and three non-structured participant observations which were internal and uncovered (three marches of protest in Val di Susa, in Novi Ligure and in Rome). In the second phase, ended in January 2014, eight focus group discussions have been carried on online in a synchronous mode (in chat) by a moderator. Four of them were with No Tav demonstrators of Val di Susa, two with activists from Piedmont not coming from Val di Susa and two with Italians taking part in the protest and resident outside Piedmont. All were chosen through avalanche sampling. For each focus conduction (each of them involving eight participants), the moderator has resorted to a structured discussion grid which takes into account the research aims. Finally, the third phase (between February and March 2014) is characterized by a revival of the individual sphere with twenty semi-structured interviews (always via web, in chat) aiming at deepening the most relevant matters resulted from each focus.