Rovira-Sancho, G. “From the Networks to the Public Square: Web 2.0 and the New Wave of Global Protests”, en Emisférica, Vol. 10, Issue 2, Hemispheric Institute, New York, 2013.
Through the last two decades, the growth of Internet access together with new developments in the field of Information Technology (IT) have transformed the way in which political activism and protest movements arise, expand, and reverberate. The appropriation of technological instruments by extensive publics has contributed to the advent of horizontal networks revolving around social protest that interweave shared webs of meaning, action, and reflection. This article characterizes the activist network as a new type of collective actor that does not fit the traditional definitions of social movements and is endowed with a marked communicative dimension. At the same time, the article constructs a genealogy of the appropriation of IT for social causes, from the early stages of the Internet to Web 2.0 and the cycle of global action that erupted in 2011 with the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street in the US, among others.
