Between blog, social networks and territory: activists and grassroots organization

First, we will take into consideration the birth of the first organizational units on the online platform meetup.com – something that has often been defined as the most important organizational innovation that the M5S came up with. We will then move on to focus on the workings of this peculiar recruiting procedure, and on what motivates those citizens approaching the Movement. Focusing our analysis solely on meetup.com would be a mistake. The Movement, in fact, has quickly succeeded in going beyond ‘virtual’ interactions, mixing online and offline models of organization. Among them, the assembly of activists plays a major role, and as the electorate grew, attempts were made to build supra-local organizational structures, even though this too implied new impediments and contradictions. The electoral success also forced the Movement to face a traditional problem: that of the militant membership base maintaining a connection with, and an effective form of control over, elected representatives. Finally, the main results of our analysis will be summarized in the concluding section of this chapter.