Reconfiguring and remediating social media as alternative media: Exploring youth activists' digital media ecology in El Salvador

Abstract

This ethnographic case study examined how the Salvadoran youth activist group Activista incorporated social media into its media ecology. Analysis revealed four main themes: social media as alternative media; the relationship between Facebook and visibility, legitimacy, and community; a social media divide; and the challenges of the digital divide and a lack of a social media strategy. This study showed how, despite digital inequalities, Activista reconfigured and remediated digital and analog tools and tactics, thus reconfiguring and remediating their relationship with journalists and social media users at large. Ultimately Activista managed to use social media as a mediated, hybridized, multi-dimensional mode of communication, contributing to our understanding of hyper-mediation and the way the digital and the analog work together in a social movement's media culture within a digitally divided country.