Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain’s indignados movement

The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today’s swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality.

[1]  Faye Ginsburg,et al.  Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain , 2002 .

[2]  B. Loader,et al.  Social media and democracy : innovations in participatory politics , 2012 .

[3]  Bill Wasik,et al.  And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture , 2009 .

[4]  David Stuart.  Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times , 2008 .

[5]  Tvrtko-Matija Šercar.  Chris Anderson: The Long Tail , 2009 .

[6]  G. Caruso,et al.  Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization , 2012 .

[7]  Yamir Moreno,et al.  Structural and Dynamical Patterns on Online Social Networks: The Spanish May 15th Movement as a Case Study , 2011, PloS one.

[8]  Clay Shirky.  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , 2008 .

[9]  D. Sperber,et al.  Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach , 1998 .

[10]  Pascal Boyer,et al.  FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS: ONTOLOGICAL AND STRATEGIC SELECTION IN EVOLVED MINDS* , 2003 .

[11]  Shawn Walker,et al.  Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Power of Blogs in the Lifecycle of Viral Political Information , 2011, Policy & Internet.

[12]  Evgeny V. Morozov,et al.  Response to Philip N. Howard's review of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom , 2011, Perspectives on Politics.

[13]  C. Briggs,et al.  Health reporting as political reporting: Biocommunicability and the public sphere , 2010 .

[14]  Carla Simone,et al.  Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion , 2012, CSCW 2012.

[15]  Christopher Kelty,et al.  Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software , 2008 .

[16]  Leysia Palen,et al.  (How) will the revolution be retweeted?: information diffusion and the 2011 Egyptian uprising , 2012, CSCW.

[17]  J. Juris.  Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization , 2008 .

[18]  Roxane Farmanfarmaian,et al.  From spectacle to spectacular: How physical space, social media and mainstream broadcast amplified the public sphere in Egypt's ‘Revolution’ , 2011 .

[19]  B. Carriére.  THE SPANISH MODEL.. , 2000 .

[20]  J. Juris.  Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation , 2012 .

[21]  N. Crossley.  Global anti-corporate struggle: a preliminary analysis. , 2002, The British journal of sociology.

[22]  Dennis M. Murphy.  The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom , 2012 .

[23]  Priscilla S. Markwood,et al.  The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More , 2006 .

[24]  Yannis Theocharis,et al.  The Wealth of (Occupation) Networks? Communication Patterns and Information Distribution in a Twitter Protest Network , 2013 .

[25]  Lisa Wade.  Banal Nationalism , 2011 .

[26]  Debra Spitulnik.  The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities , 1996 .

[27]  Raymond Pettit.  Digital Anthropology , 2010, Journal of Advertising Research.

[28]  P. Bourdieu,et al.  The rules of art : genesis and structure of the literary field , 1997 .

[29]  John Postill.  Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian , 2006 .