During the first two decades of social networks, the old-timers said that the digital agora – Facebook, forums, news aggregators – should not be confused with the real world. They argued that this lively online discussion was a mere bubble, and that most of the important things happened in other arenas. However, the divorce raised alarm bells. After two years of lively discussions about piracy, copyleft and downloads, Congress passed the so-called Sinde law to stop downloads. It was approved at the beginning of 2011 with 85% of the Chamber’s votes in favor. No one seemed to see this as alarming, but the truth is that this near-unanimous vote revealed a schism between representative democracy and the younger half of the population.
Not by chance, four months after that vote, an intimidating camp emerged in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol that questioned the capacity of representative democracy to absorb social moods. That law and that camp spelled the end of bipartisanship. And the 2015 elections, the first indication that perhaps the front page of El País – to quote the hegemonic medium at the time – reflected less accurately what was happening than a news aggregator such as Menéame.
Since then, partly due to the peripatetic trajectory of new parties such as Podemos or Ciutadans, the elders of the place have warned against the enthusiasm of confusing the digital agora with the discussion of the country. They were somewhat right, although they do this while predicting the return of bipartisanship – they have been doing it since 2015, undeterred by failure – which reveals that there is so much wishful thinking in their judgments. ·lusory”, confusing desire and reality – like reasoned reflection. Both nostalgic dread and righteous thought.
These pages published yesterday a surprising report by Carles Castro on the decline of Spanish identity, the increasingly numerous adherence to decentralized Spain and the limited impact that political upheavals – in 2017 or 2023 – have on this growing identity secularism of the Spanish population.
I said “surprising”, but only to the extent that it contradicts what the four television channels – agglutinated in an oligopoly of only two operators broadcasting for the whole country from the same sleepy city of Madrid, San Sebastián de los Reyes – they have been telling us for years. The error of the current Private Television law (four state licenses in the hands of two companies in the same city) is such that it has created a parallel reality that sociological works and elections never tire of disproving. So maybe the network formerly known as Twitter isn’t the world, but those drunken webs of self-indulgent Madrid discussions certainly aren’t Spain. And this is certainly good news.
