Protesting in a Cultural Frame

ICTs and particularly the Internet are changing national and international politics. International organizations, activists, and even national governments are now extending their organizational resources and apparatuses to the digital virtual worlds, thus expanding the horizons of politics to new levels and challenges. In this chapter, the author concentrates on a surprising and unprecedented initiative that took place in Portugal in March 12th, 2011, the “Geração à Rasca” protests, as well as on the March 12th Movement (M12M), the social movement that followed it. More precisely, the chapter examines how Internet-enabled technologies, like social media, were used as tactics for political organization and mobilization, and how several political cultures were activated. In a country where non-conventional politics was limited to unions and to well-demarcated interests, those two initiatives inaugurated a new era of political participation and democratic opposition. For the first time, 4 young graduates, who never participated in politics before, were able to mobilize more than 500,000 people in several cities of the country, while adapting their messages to the particular political cultures of their “natural” constituencies, the young unemployed or underpaid seasonable workers, to the overall population, dissatisfied with the economic performance of successive governments, and to the more radical groups still committed to the political cultures of the 1974 Carnations Revolution. Besides those tactical and discursive uses, political and economic contexts, contingent events, and the support of symbolic elites were also important factors in both initiatives.