LGBT+ digital activism. Notes for a communication conceptualization

Abstract

Incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet into the structures and repertoires of contemporary social movements has developed concepts that aim to account for this techno-communicative assemblage. However, most of these proposals stem from an approach that reduces the use of ICT and the Internet to an instrumental dimension, thus minimizing the reconfigurations they entail when practicing and investigating current forms of activism. Therefore, this article seeks to develop a coherent concept of digital activism from a communicational perspective to identify its characteristics and the analytical implications that arise from the subject-technology-communication relationship. To accomplish this task, the analysis of the Mexican LGBT+ movement provides for this task because its experience empirically demonstrates the diversity of uses and meanings that ICT and the Internet can acquire for a contemporary social movement. This work concludes that digital activism promotes asynchronous, deterritorialized, disembodied, and reticular forms of action by the individuals who comprise a social movement; analytically, digital activism is not limited to the political arena but centers its impact on the symbolic dispute present in everyday life. Finally, from the communicational perspective, digital activism invites us to make visible the uses and meanings of those actors who, through the Internet, recalibrate their position in the hybrid public space and redefine their profiles to embody new forms of struggle.