The Project
This project starts with the following hypothesis: Twitter is more than a microblogging platform, it's a social empowerment tool which was very important during social movements like the #15M Movement..
In recent years, smart mobs have been responsible for different collective actions. These smart mobs have been using the social network Twitter to organize and demonstrate themselves. This project is focused on the #15M Movement because of our current socio-economical context.
The #15M Movement is a social movement, still active nowadays, and consists of pacifist citizen actions that arose in Twitter. The number of posts (tweets) about the #15M Movement is huge, and this makes their coverage difficult using conventional Twitter tools. This problem forces users to know about the #15M Movement using typical mass media.
In order to solve this problem, this project proposes to use tweets about the #15M Movement to get a story beyond mass media, as these mass media offer different interpretations of the phenomenon. It consists of extracting this story from raw material generated by the same users that participate in the movement.
The main goal of the project is to prove that it is possible to do a tactical use of Twitter to build a narration from an online multiplicity of voices, resulting in a collective memory.
Beyond Trending Topics: a sonorice visualization about #15M consists of a visual and audible online platform that represents tweets that thousands of people sent to Twitter. At the moment it only shows the posts of the campings period (from 13-05-2011 to 12-06-2011) and gets a collective narration.
