Net-activism, memory and archives:

digital heritage as an instrument for social justice

Resumo

This article aims to reflect on the power relations historically built by groups that dominate social spaces and their implications in the creation of official memory, which ends up being impacted by the continuous process of marginalization of various places, including the population experiencing homelessness. Based on this, we consider memory, archives, and heritage as potential instruments for both silencing and insurgency of invisibilized individuals. In the case studied in this article, we emphasize the transformative and political potential of memory. Using the NGO SP Invisível profile as the research corpus, we propose an analysis of the narratives generated by these digital social movements, which emerged in the context of the early 21st century as a form of digital activism that goes beyond social media, but exists as an ecology that depends on both digital and human elements to exist, with the main objective of transforming reality through the diffusion of narratives of people in situations of homelessness and/or social marginalization. With this, we seek to problematize the banalization of the neoliberal ethos, which convinces us that success and failure are individual instances, so that concern for social well-being and the environment take a back seat and, in this context, are presented as expenses of the state and not as a collective need. Thus, we observe that these initiatives, created on platforms managed by large corporations, in the midst of late capitalism, are capable of using these spaces as a means that intertwines media and social movements, becoming an integral part of the process of visibility and destigmatization of traditionally invisibilized bodies.