Collective tellers: Web collaboration, two examples

We are comparing - through both online and offline observations - peculiarities and common features among a web students’ community and pro public water citizen’s movements in Bologna. Observing the students’ activity in a Laboratory on 2.0 territorial marketing we inferred that the communities who lives and discuss in the medium are, in turn, influenced by it. The pro public water movements rose up recently to promote their instances during a referendum, however after their obtained a great success in terms of participation and final result, the sense of belonging weakened quickly. These observations are common to both cases and let us suppose that individuals may identify with more than one community contemporaneously, as well as serially, changing affiliations with great fluidity. The second common feature we highlighted is the need that catalyzes the interest in becoming part of an online community. Both the students and people participating to online and offline forum where interested in obtaining, sharing or producing information lacking in mainstream media. In this research paper we describe laboratory’s and water movements’ participants' acquisition of new skills and expertise, as well as the practices that emerged in their communities. We suppose a shift from the classical two-steps-communication flow to a form of scattered clouding steps flow of communication where opinion leaders at the same time are spread in the network and they can quit or be dismissed from this role quickly, possibly unregretfully.