Mockusian Delirium: Communication Technologies and Political Action by Youth

Abstract

This paper is an interpretation of the events that took place with the Antanas Mockus’ presidential aspirations between March and June 2010. Based on the thesis that both the social problems and citizen representations are created and controlled through discursive games, the privileged channel of which are the new information and communication technologies (NICT), progress in made on the public biography of Antanas Mockus, from the moment he was elected Mayor of Bogota in January 1995 and until he quit the green party in June 2011, stopping with the event of his virtual recreation as presidential candidate thanks to the dynamized events in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The result of this effort makes it possible to, on one side, re-read the relationship between politics and emotion within the behavioral framework of Web 2.0 and, on the other, the ways in which multitudes of young people execute their power through channels that are more similar to their expectations in order to form collective dreams, invigorate opinion changes and build social meanings.