Communication Strategies used by Chilean Teenagers in the Educational Movement of May 2006

The purpose of this study, presented at the Digital Content Creation Second International DREAM Conference of University of Southern Denmark, was to outline how adolescents use existing media as tools and platforms for communication for social change. More specifically, it focused on understanding the strategies of action and the communication practices displayed between May and July of 2006 by more than a half million Chilean teenagers during the self-directed organising movement in favour of the right to a high-quality public education.


The author chose her methodology based on the student movement's use of the internet for self organisation: "the Web was employed as a site particularly useful for working on the historiography of youth communication practices for social change. In fact, in arguing that the Web is a flexible methodological repository containing traces of facts, reported by different actors and dotted about the net, I was in search of the youths’ – but also of social and communication – fingerprints about this historical Chilean adolescent movement still circulating on the net."


The student movement (protesting the effects of the LOCE’s law - The Organic Constitutional Law on Teaching, Law No. 18, 96 - by which students receive the quality of education for which they are able to pay) organised around students' social knowledge of "the profound gap between public and private education". According to the study, "[t]hey distributed their speeches and actions ...through communication across a whole range of channels – evidence of their communication strategies and discourses can be found on Web pages, national and international online traditional media Web records (radio, television, and newspapers), Web logs (blogs), Fotologs, Wikipedia [an open and free internet encyclopaedia of user-generated information], emails, chats, You Tube and mobile phones."

In addition, as stated by the author, the students created "image events, staged acts of protest designed for media dissemination" in massive street demonstrations and in public places. They adopted the penguin as a symbol and associated it with their movement through dressing as penguins in public school uniforms, causing the media to label the movement the "Penguin’s Revolution".


Internal organisation of the movement was done through deliberative assemblies and meetings, mentored exclusively by adolescents, which were focused on decision making through participation, dialogue, and consensus, coordinated through mobile phones, email, and chat. After this process, when decisions had been made, announcements to the whole country and to the government were made in the name of the student movement body, by calling journalists to press conferences. They scheduled press conferences just prior to prime-time television shows and transmitted resolutions directly to the entire country, formerly a practice considered a privileged use limited to Chile's president. As students took over and occupied schools, they carried out coordination through mobile phones and email and posted pictures in the media and on the internet to show the public the activities inside the lyceums. International media interviewed them; they appeared on programmes speaking with government authorities; they received coverage on international non-governmental organisation (NGO) websites; and their advocacy caused the United Nations (UN) to contact the Chilean government on behalf of children's rights. They used Wikipedia to become, as stated here, narrators of their own history.


The author concludes that the Penguin Revolution shows: 1) that adolescents sharing social concerns are able to organise self-directed movements for participating in social change processes; 2) how they use media communication for movement purposes; and 3) what might be the social relevance and the possibilities of non-traditional social actors’ access to media, new media, and mobile technologies.