ICTlogy

Abstract:

#YoSoy132 became the most talked event in the final stretch of the last Mexican election. The election, held on July 1 2012, resulted in the victory of Enrique Peña Nieto, reinstating, after a twelve-year hiatus, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had previously ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. Throughout the campaign, polls indicated that Peña had a comfortable lead ahead of his adversaries. The emergence of the #YoSoy132 movement changed this panorama. The movement called out for opposition against Peña and had considerable impact on the electoral process and its results, as well as in the dynamics and politics of information diffusion and media. This paper argues that the #YoSoy132 phenomenon does not fit into the traditional definition of social movements. Through the analysis of close to a million tweets, this paper presents an interdisciplinary approach to #YoSoy132. First we set the phenomenon in the history of social movements in Mexico. We will analyze how members of the movement interpret history and how they view themselves in history. Second, we analyze how political parties used the Internet in their campaigns, and in what ways #YoSoy132 fits into this framework. Third, taking some notes from the social network analysis and complexity theories, we evaluate the behavior and communication dynamics from monitoring the hashtag #YoSoy132 on Twitter, and we see the relationship of this movement with the media and its uses as a network, opening interdisciplinary views to analyze the social movements in the twenty-first century.