Social media and virality in the 2014 student protests in Venezuela: Rethinking engagement and dialogue in times of imitation.

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between social media, political mobilization and civic engagement in the context of the students’ protests in Venezuela of 2014. The authors ask whether these technologies were used by participants as catalytic element to trigger the protests and amplify them across the country or if they were instead a galvanizing factor among more general conditions. The analysis uses “cultural chaos” and “virality/contagion” as theoretical approaches to discuss these events in order to provoke discussion around the relationship between protests and social media. However, as the authors clarify, far from a technodeterministic assumption that sees social media has somehow having agency in itself, their argumentative provocation highlights its role as a platform for political engagement through “imitation” and emotions while rejecting false dichotomies of rationality/irrationality among the “crowd.”