Midterm
From Wikipedia:
“On February 4, 2008, several rallies were held in Colombia and in other locations around the world, criticizing FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) and demanding the liberation of hundreds of hostages. The protests were originally organized through the social networking site Facebook. Millions of people in Colombia and thousands worldwide participated in the rallies.”
The Facebook-promoted global protest against FARC is a cas d’ecole of the power of social networking as a means to foster civic and political engagement across different countries and social groups. Looked closely, it made evident subtle processes that operate at the levels of culture and language, such as the alarming process of polarization of opinion in all sides of the Colombian political spectrum. A reflection of this are the online discussion forums of El Tiempo, the country's most influential newspaper: the content and tone of the entries reflect the tendency to radicalize against political opponents of either side. While supporters of the government consider anyone holding slightly leftist positions as guerrilla, conversely, those supporting the government are labeled as accomplices of the paramilitary death-squads. This dynamics has quietly generated a reversal of ethical values among Colombians of all political parties, to an extent in which members of either side tend to condemn the atrocities of only one of the actors in the conflict, while justifying the others.
The level of language violence in these public forums is a reflection of the surrounding physical violence, and can be analyzed as a function of the kind of media coverage that a given particular instance of a forum is about. The hypothesis is that the wages of the public’s opinion are affected (exacerbated or otherwise) by the language and inherent political biases of the corresponding newspaper or social network, and that this can be made visible through technical XXX in order to produce a compelling artistic reflection of the complex interplay between reality, media and individual and group politics.
