Abstract
This chapter presents an analysis of the disintermediation of the messages. That is, a radical transformation that affects who produces and disseminates information. The authors observe an important change in how support processes are collected, as well as in the way that citizens adhere to a cause or mobilization. For this purpose, they focus on Black Lives Matters, a process of connective action that was launched to denounce the way in which African-American people were treated by the police in the United States, and to fight for the political rights of this community. The chapter highlights the most relevant aspects of this case and the disintermediation of the messages, and also explores criticisms that are related to the undesired aspects of this form of disintermediation.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin was murdered on the night of 26 February 2012. Zimmerman never denied killing him, but declared that the young man was behaving suspiciously, and that is why he shot him (Gutman & Tienabeso, 2012).
- 2.
Besides being one of the young co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, Garza is the director of special projects for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and is a columnist for newspaper such as: The Guardian, The Nation, The Feminist Wire and Huffington Post (Brydum, 2015).
- 3.
A young activist who had founded Dignity and Power Now in 2012, an NGO based in Los Angeles that fought for the rights and dignity of incarcerated people, their families and communities (Brydum, 2015).
- 4.
Activist and writer, she was also the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an organization that defends the rights of black and Latin American immigrants in the United States (Dalton, 2015).
- 5.
According to the report issued by the Justice Department of the United States, Michael Brown and his friends stole some cigarettes from a shop without any kind of weapons. Wilson received a call about a “robbery under way” went to the site and blocked access with his vehicle. Wilson declared that Brown tried to reach the vehicle and he had no option but to use his weapon (Department of Justice, 2015).
- 6.
In August 2017, according to the BLM web page, there were 38 chapters in all, distributed across different cities of the United States and Toronto (Canada).
- 7.
@BLM_INC; @blmpasadena and @BLMFLORIDA.
- 8.
The first two were in memory of Eric Garner, murdered in New York on 17 July 2014 and his last words before dying from the electric shock applied by a police officer. The third is the symbol of the Ferguson protests in August 2014.
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Robles-Morales, J.M., Córdoba-Hernández, A.M. (2019). The Disintermediation of the Message: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter. In: Digital Political Participation, Social Networks and Big Data. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27757-4_7
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