Reclaiming, proclaiming, and maintaining collective identity in the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico: an examination of digital frontstage and backstage activism through social media and instant messaging platforms

Abstract

This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of collective identity is still able to yield relevant insights into the study of current movements, especially in connection with the use of social media platforms. Through the appropriations of social media, Mexican students were able to oppose the negative identification fabricated by the PRI party, reclaim their agency and their role as heirs of a long tradition of rebellion, generate collective identification processes, and find ‘comfort zones’ to lower the costs of activism, reinforcing their internal cohesion and solidarity. The article stresses the importance of the internal communicative dynamics that develop in the backstage of social media (Facebook chats and groups) and through instant messaging services (WhatsApp), thus rediscovering the pivotal linkage between collective identity and internal communication that characterized the first wave of research on digital social movements. The findings point out how that internal cohesion and collective identity are fundamentally shaped and reinforced in the social media backstage by practices of ‘ludic activism’, which indicates that social media represent not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous ‘communicative resistance grammar’ emerges.

Keywords:

• collective identity
• social media
• social movements
• digital activism
• internal communication
• frontstage activism
• backstage activism
• WhatsApp
• technopolitics

Notes on contributor

Emiliano Treré is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico), and Research Fellow in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University (Canada). He has contributed to the fields of social movements and media theory in journals such as New Media & Society, Communication Theory, the International Journal of Communication, and Convergence. He is finishing a book provisionally titled ‘Contemporary Mexican struggles and digital media resistance’. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XbocXsFkI (accessed 19 June 2014).

2 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igxPudJF6nU (accessed 20 June 2014. My translation from the original Spanish).

3 Regarding the concepts of front- and backstage activism, I am of course indebted to the work on the self-presentation of the self of Goffman (1959), where the author provides a ‘dramaturgical' account of social interaction as a theatrical performance. When individuals perform a role in relation to an audience in public settings, we can think of this as frontstage, similar to an actor on stage who is presenting a performance. Instead, the backstage is a place where the actors can express aspects of themselves in ways that their audience would find unacceptable and where performers can relax and step out of character. The literature that has applied Goffman's dramaturgical approach to social media and the presentation of the self is extensive (for a review see Hogan, 2010), and engaging with it is far from the intentions of this article. The concept will be used in this article in order to shed light on the complexity of social media, conceived as intricate communicative ecosystems that can be used by activists in multiple ways: while the second wave of studies on digital activism focuses especially on the analysis of data gathered from the digital frontstage of these platforms, the importance of the interactions taking place in the backstage will also be stressed here.

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9dkSK1pgzA (accessed 2 March 2015). All the quotes are my translations from the original in Spanish.

5 Important Facebook groups for the development of their collective identity were: #YoSoy132-Académicos; Grupo de Trabajo para la Democratización de los medios #YoSoy132; YoSoy132DEM; Comité de estudiantes de Posgrado; YO SOY 132 QUERETARO.

6 The concept of meme refers to the viral spreading of cultural ideas, symbols, and practices. The literature addressing this phenomenon is rich and often ambiguous, especially when it comes to clarifying the role that memes play in connection with social media platforms and online practices. I here use the term ‘meme’ or ‘digital meme’ in the meaning assigned to it by my interviewees, who refer to digital pictures or videos with humorous content usually expressed in a text close to the image that make fun of and/or mock a person/group or a certain situation. While the literature has underlined the construction and negotiation of collective identities, thanks to the viral capabilities of memes on the social media frontstage (Gal et al., 2015), I hereby stress the importance that memes acquire also when they are stripped of their ‘spreadability’ and they remain just satirical images and videos that are exchanged within backstage groups and conversations in order to connect with a rebellious past, lower the intensity of the protest, and reinforce internal solidarity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 2013 FOFIUAQ grant of the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico) [grant number FCP201410].