The technologies of internet in the contentious repertoires: Clues and signs of avaaz in a multi-sited fieldwork

The article turns to the relationship between the communication power of the internet (CASTELLS, 2009) and the contentious repertoires (TILLY, 1995) in the field of transnational activism (TAROW, 2000). By following clues and signs of a global online community of mobilization, called Avaaz, the paper emphasizes the forms of belonging to this organization as well as the campaigns reported in frames at Avaaz’ portuguese-language website (www.avaaz.org/po) as means of understanding new forms of protest, political participation and even an enlargement of the idea of ​​public sphere that seems to be taking place in contemporary societies. The multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and the evidentiary paradigm lead to plots in which the bricolages are produced in an exercise of observant participation in frames on the website of this organization that was formed in 2007. In this sense, since the new interaction practices seem to increase the velocity of publicizing the campaigns and sparking off public protests, by way of mobilization networks that are more symmetrical and less hierarchical than those configured up to the early 1990s, we can argue: do these connections extend possibilities of political participation, as well as extend the public sphere itself, signaling innovations in the contentious repertoires?