Impact of social media on chilean student movement

Abstract

In 2006, over 700,000 Chilean secondary students took to the streets in demand of educational equity. This revolucio´n ping€uina was quieted by promises of solutions coming from a multidisciplinary group of specialists summoned to tackle the crisis. In 2011, university students organized massive demonstrations to call for the end of a neoliberal economic model that had shattered public education and fostered inequality. In these movements, the emergence of digital social media, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogging, becomes an effective catalyst for raising social awareness over social, political, historical, and economic factors that perpetuate inequality in the Global South. The aim of our study is to describe the construal of the discursive rep esentation of the studentmobilization in a corpus of 349 blog comments to editorials and opinion columns of online Chilean newspapers. Our research adopts the theoreticalmethodological framework of two paradigms, namely, the tenets of the critical discourse analysis and the principles of the systemic functional linguistics. Both paradigms throw light on the meaning that ideational resources – expressed by the presence of taxonomic relations (repetitions, antonyms, synonyms, etc.) and nuclear relations (participants connected to a series of act vities) – have in the construction of portraits of reality in discourse. The results of our exploration into construction of the representation of social actors in the comments posted by e-citizens showed that the Chilean student movement is construed as an instance of restitution of the citizens’ rights and the restoration of honesty and dependability in the political sphere. This study is part of a research funded by the FONDECYT Project 1120784.