The Fitna issue: performing citizenship and new forms of dissent on YouTube

“Person of the year: You.”- Time, December , . Two months before Google Inc. had bought YouTube for , billions. Today, over  billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. It is self-evident that something new and invisible started that day. Probably the #Occupy Movement is only the first wave of a larger underground social change. Starting from this point my article aims to investigate the complex relation between User Generated Content websites (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, ecc.) and the new Forms of Dissent. Obviously an exhaustive analysis of a wide and complex topic like this requires a more deep and extensive treatise. However, in this article I only try to chart a route from the coming of a new technological element like the “hyperlink” to the development of new social concepts like “participative culture” and “performing citizenship”. Actually, UGC systems are not only an easier and faster way to communicate and new forms of dissent are not “new” only because of it. UGC websites constitute the environment for the surfacing of different sets of practices, strategies and maybe life forms. Between mass-media and UGC systems occurs a fundamental change in relations of production. The new actor on the scene, the prosumer, is a subject who daily produces and consumes digital goods for free. In order to detect some key points of this new frame of performativity and to define what kind of “we” can be created by the connection of a lot of “you”, I start defining the actorial position of the subject inside both systems and then I proceed to analyze a specific call for media activism in the context of the Fitna controversy.