Virtual and Physical Geographies of Social Activism The case study of Madrid’s Indignados
2012
Contarin, Nicola | Laurier, Eric
The recent phenomenon of Occupy and of the Indignados has rekindled the fire of urban social movements in the last years: these movements surely represent the new prototype of social activism in the XXI century particularly for the step forward in the goals that they are determined to achieve, and in the way that is being used in order to accomplish these objectives. The particularity of these new social movements relies mainly in the large use of the Internet, new media and information technology that they do in order to communicate their ideas and organisational details, to recruit more members to their cause and to maintain a constant presence in the virtual space, from which they can conduct the guidelines for social activism in the urban space. In this research the relationship of the "Indignados" of Madrid, Spain, with the urban public space and with the virtual space is examined through the use of semi-structured interviews which allow to highlight what is the personal and direct understanding of this relationship according to the members of the movement themselves. It will show, then, how the movement is inserted in the two spatial dimensions of physical reality and virtual reality by the people who are actually the real protagonists of this phenomenon, and it will hopefully tell us in which direction is this movement going.
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