Digital Social Media Cultures: New Languages and Configurations for Participation, Dialogue and Collectivity

Abstract

Today's digital ecosystems, in which social networking sites play a leading role, foster communicative phenomena of great interest, where diverse content creators make individual and collective experiences visible. In some cases, these communities give rise to cyberactivist movements, or become a trend, generating dialogue and debate on issues of interest to society. In other cases, they are presented as challenges promoted by brands and influencers, constituting true digital cultures of great impact on networks such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or Snapchat. This topic has become an object of interest in the academic sphere due to its implications for understanding the interactions that characterize citizen participation and (self)representation. The purpose of this special issue is to explore the strategies, languages, codes and skills that make it possible to connect and make content visible so that it becomes a trend, exploring the new modes of expression and communication of various groups of creators and their communicative and multimodal skills within digital social media.