I am going! The Facebook’s users’ attendance to events as a performative political act in Occupy Estelita Movement

Abstract

This work’s proposal is operating the Theory of Performativity in complex communication processes like those emerged into the Social Networks territory. The study recovers Austin’s (1975) theory of Speech Acts and the concept of Performativity stated by Butler (1997) to analyze the usage of Facebook Events by Occupy Estelita supporters. It was analyzed two Facebook Events: Political Act for Freedom of Speech and Occupy +5. We analyzed both events applying questionnaires and in-depth interviews with participants. We concluded that the usage of the attendance buttons on Facebook Events by Occupy Estelita activists is potentially performative, since people use those buttons to manifest their public support to the social movement. At the end, we argued that the potential of manifesting support through Facebook is not necessarily connected with people presence in real demonstrations offline, it means, the body presence in physical territories, which is an important characteristic to define occupy movements.