Undermining Digital Dissent

This Thursday, 8 October 2015, Ørecomm is hosting Emiliano Treré from the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico) with a seminar titled Undermining digital dissent: the perils of social media for social change.

In 2012, the #YoSoy132 movement emerged in Mexico asking for the democratization of the Mexican media and criticizing the strategy of the PRI Party and its candidate. In contrast to the celebratory literature developed around the movement that has praised the role of social media in the development of a ‘fifth state’, and conceived them as alternative media to the so-called Mexican telecracy, an extended ethnography of #YoSoy132 provided by Emiliano Treré, Associate Professor, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico), highlights a much more controversial scenario.

“Technologies are not mere instruments that activists use against neoliberal power, but ecologies of mediations that are constantly crossed by frictions and conflicts, and inhabited by suspicion and paranoia,” says Emiliano Treré.

In this seminar hosted by Ørecomm he will show that everyday frictions and struggles, together with issues of exploitation, dataveillance, control, censorship, and intents of delegitimization plagued the digital resistance of the Mexican movement. Aiming to contribute to the critical literature on digital activism,  Emiliano Treré demostrates how political economy lens can benefit from the integration of a focus on negotiations among activists that underline everyday conflicts and tensions.  Recently he has co-edited (with Gerbaudo, P.) a Special Issue of Information, Communication & Society. You can have a look at his analysis in this Special Issue on Social Media and Protests Identities.

Interested to learn more? Ørecomm team invites you to CBIT, Roskilde University (Room 40.2-25) on 8 October at 09.30-11 am. Register today to secure your participation by writing to ttufte@ruc.dk.

Emiliano Treré is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico), and Research Fellow in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University, Canada. He has published extensively on digital activism and the communicative practices of contemporary social movements.  He is also a co-editor (with Magallanes-Blanco, C.) of a forthcoming Special Section of the International Journal of Communication on Latin American Struggles and Digital Media Resistance. He is finishing a book provisionally titled ‘Contemporary Mexican struggles and digital media resistance’. His publications can be found here.

Image via Flickr