Communication as a Tool for the Integration of Socio-Digitized Cross-Border Communities: The Social Conflict in Argentina/Brazil across the Networks

Abstract

This essay aims at addressing the axes that are in line with the new processes the Latin American integration entails, in order to provide a new vision and a reflective review about the Argentinean and Brazilian scenario around communication as a cross-border phenomenon. In this sense, the axes are presented in relation to the cyber-militant communities present in the network, which, in one way or another, share the same concepts of democracy, freedom of speech, and rights. This approach aims at integrating concepts that stem from communication, the new forms of citizen engagement, and the social conflict in the current political landscape. The goal is to visualize how through the new massive forms of expression, in the public and of imminent politic-institutional crisis scenarios, are born response processes which enunciate and denounce new discourses, and which in some way represent a worldview that goes along with the idea of “feeling Latin American.” Communication is regarded as the cross axis to think today’s integration, since the series of socio-technological phenomena that have been taking place in many Latin American countries have been able to concentrate diverse communities around a certain issue. As from there, the debate is thought and opened around the development of new tension processes between politics, civil institutions in crisis, and the population. This, in terms of social conflict, supposes a conversion of situations that tend to legitimize the word from new narratives.