¿Cómo contribuyen las redes sociales en el desarrollo de la subjetividad en sociedades autoritarias? El caso de #YoSoy132 en México

Abstract

This paper seeks to address how social media is shaping the traditional structures of power in some countries known to have an authoritarian government, such being the case of Mexico. Online conversations give users tremendous visibility.
 We will enlist the characteristics of why Mexico is considered authoritarian. Then, with the example of #YoSoy132, we will argue how social media conversations are becoming a common practice that can strengthen citizenship. We will prove that these practices innovate information production and allow citizen surveillance, therefore they make users visible actors. Before social media, government control went hand in hand with opaque practices and collusion of mass media. We examine the conflict between authoritarian practices in Mexico and the logic of visibility, that we understand as a form of citizenship behavior emerging in amateur social media discourse that nourishes itself from the audiovisual world. Relying on a methodology based on a conceptual framework of social movements, we analyzed online conversations as empirical evidence of the social media movement. We find a civic symbolic imaginary that corresponds to the sociocultural moment of the first decade of 2000.