Casual Politics: From slacktivism to emergent movements and pattern recognition

Abstract

AbstrAct: Politics have traditionally looked at the exercise of democracy with at least two implicit assumptions: (1) institutions are the normal channel of politics and (2) voting is the normal channel for politics to make decisions. Of course, reality is much more complex than that, but, on the one hand, all the extensions of that model beyond or around voting –issues related to access to public information, to deliberation and argumentation, to negotiation and opinion shaping, or related to ac-countability – are based on institutions as the core axis around which politics spin. On the other hand, the existence and analysis of extra-institutional political participation –awareness raising, lobbying, citizen movements, protests and demonstrations – have also most of the times been put in relation-ship with affecting the final outcomes of institutional participation and decision-making, especially in affecting voting. Inspired in the concept of «feet voting » (developed by Tiebout, Friedman and others) in this paper we want to challenge this way of understanding politics as a proactive and conscious action, and propose instead a reactive and unconscious way of doing politics, based on small, casual contributions and its posterior analysis by means of big data, emergence analysis and pattern recognition. In our theoretical approach –illustrated with real examples in and out of the field of politics – we will

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