This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses have been inserted into the movement’s political message, and how the construction of the web as a myth has shaped the movement’s discourse and political practice. The 5-Star Movement is compared and contrasted with other social and political movements in western countries which have displayed a similar emphasis on new media, such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement, and the Pirate Parties in Sweden and Germany. By adopting and mutating cyber-utopian discourses from the so-called Californian ideology, the movement symbolically identifies itself with the web. The traditional political establishment is associated with “old” media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a “walking dead,” doomed to be superseded and buried by a web-based direct democracy.

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is generated by heterogenous ‘information communities’ that co-operate to produce reusable units of geographic knowledge. A consensual lexicon is a key factor to enable this open production model. Lexical definitions help demarcate the boundaries of terms, forming a thin semantic ground on which knowledge can travel. In VGI, lexical definitions often appear to be inconsistent, circular, noisy and highly idiosyncratic. Computing the semantic similarity of these ‘volunteered lexical definitions’ has a wide range of applications in GIScience, including information retrieval, data mining and information integration. This article describes a knowledge-based approach to quantify the semantic similarity of lexical definitions. Grounded in the recursive intuition that similar terms are described using similar terms, the approach relies on paraphrase-detection techniques and the lexical database WordNet. The cognitive plausibility of the approach is evaluated in the context of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Semantic Network, obtaining high correlation with human judgements. Guidelines are provided for the practical usage of the approach.

Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Although these representations of place are increasingly important and consequential, little is known about their characteristics and possible biases. Analysing a corpus of Google search results generated for 188 capital cities, this article investigates the geographic dimension of search results, focusing on searches such as "Lagos" and "Rome" on different localized versions of the engine. This study answers the questions: To what degree is this city-related information locally produced and diverse? Which countries are producing their own representations and which are represented by others? Through a new indicator of localness of search results, we identify the factors that contribute to shape this uneven digital geography, combining several development indicators. The development of the publishing industry and scientific production appears as a fairly strong predictor of localness of results. This empirical knowledge will support efforts to curb the digital divide, promoting a more inclusive, democratic information society