The Invisible Spring": Internet and Political Practices in Colombian and Brazilian Mobilization

When it comes to social movements like the "Arab Spring", Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados in Spain, there is widespread uncertainty about the extent of their international dimensions.  But we do know that these movements penetrated borders to gain support from other contexts, where the use of Internet and social networks (especially Facebook) involved the configuration of a particular mode of protest and mobilization. What is the relationship between these events and the mobilizations in other contexts?

Two cases concern us: the MANE (Mesa Amplia Nacional Estudiantil) in Colombia, which deployed an unprecedented student movement in the last 40 years of national history, whose founding charter explicitly refers to the events in Tunisia, Egypt and Spain, and ACAMPA SAMPA OCUPA SAMPA from the Occupy movement in Sao Paulo, born of the global call to install camps in different cities in October 2011.  

This paper shows, in a transnational perspective, how the emergence of new forms of communication in the Latin American context involves a reconfiguration of political action and denotes a new politicity process. The « Invisible Spring » is the metaphor of the origin and deployment of the new movements, their actions against invisibility, and the new online collective actions and protest mobilizations.

This paper will to expose the invisibility notion concerning three dimensions: the international mass media, the political character of these mobilizations, and the connections between these movements and the three international movements (Arab Spring, Indignados, and Occupy). The analysis concerning the Latin American cases presents two foci: the motivations and discourses and the actions and organisational forms.

Overall, the framework is a PhD research project oriented to analyse the transformations of political practices of the young people in Latin America through the use of Internet (Colombia and Brazil cases).

This paper can be presented in spanish.