Activismo y RedesResignificación y apropiación de la tecnología digital

Abstract

The following research intends to contribute to a better understanding of the effects on the daily life of the subjects of the reformulation of the power and resistance relations caused by the total imbrication of the Internet in the social relations observed in the societies of the advanced capitalism. I made an analysis of the social and symbolic space that arises from the intersection of the dimensions of Power, Technology and Subjects/subjectivities. Such dimensions express the research interests that arise from my personal trajectory as a technologist and as an activist. And fundamentally, they express the necessary keys to account for the profound social transformations that have occurred in the recent decades. The conclusions I reach out to reveal the multitude of highly complex techno-social elements that modulate the subjects' digitally mediated social practices. I chose to lay down my research problem on the potential restrictions on the human agency of the automation of social actions and decisions by imperceptibly transforming into machine-based servitudes that have been inducing the hegemonic management of powerful technological resources hosted on the Internet, such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, advanced algorithms, etc. On the basis of these considerations, I decided to investigate how the subjects and groups of activists who confront the logics of control and the commodification of life resolve such issues and who, in their endeavour, give centrality within their practices to the use of networks and digital devices. Thus I shaped a concept of technological Appropriation from what the situated actors understand as such and that is summed up in achieving greater autonomy in four areas: as a user, with respect to infrastructure, in the social and in the political. And that to achieve these aims, four situational arrangements are made up which seem to characterize in general these processes and which I denominated micro devices of political-social resistance, of technical knowledge, of participatory management of the social initiatives and of motivation and gender-focused care. In the course of these concepts, I then advanced in the proposal to formulate a Right to the Network that could be articulated with other emerging rights, particularly with the Right to the City, thus seeking to enrich the effectiveness and strategic vision of social movements