Contemporary popular mobilization

lulaços, flashmobs and semiotic bomb

Abstract

Flashmobs are organized by social media and leveraged by internet tools capable of quickly spreading the group's agenda and ideals to as many people as possible. With that, many people coalesce around the execution of an action. The objective of this paper is to explore the conceptual lines of this phenomenon and its relation with the notion of identification and psychology of groups, going through the exploration of the events known as Jornadas de Junho, besides the semiotic bomb concepts, seeking to highlight the modern means of communication , for mobilizations like flashmobs and lulaços. The flashmob phenomenum matters as much for advertising and marketing as it does for politics. Freud, when reflecting on suggestibility, pointed to libido, which would be camouflaged in suggestibility. What most called the author's attention is the form of identification in which there is a desire to put oneself in the other's place, to be in the same situation. In Brazil, the so called “Jornadas de Junho”, in 2013, presented semiotic bombs such as the images of black blocs setting fire to garbage cans and breaking windowpanes. The new communication tools allow a process of territorialization and deterritorialization. Still, in Brazil, it is possible to highlight the Lulaços, which are party-political flashmobs, observed from 2018 onwards, in several cities in the country, which sought, in the semiotic bomb, a strategy for the dissemination of their agendas.