Micro-Social Movements in the Digital Age: From Networked Solidarity to Algorithmic Consciousness

Digital micro-movements are distinctive phenomena of the contemporary era, characterized by horizontality, rapid mobilization, and strong dependence on algorithmic infrastructures. They are not merely an online transposition of traditional mobilizations but introduce new forms of solidarity, leadership, and collective consciousness. By integrating classical sociological theory, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Simmel, and Elias, with recent perspectives from media and digital activism studies (Castells, Tufekci, Bennett & Segerberg, Zuboff), this paper develops a framework centered on three categories: networked solidarity, diffused leadership, and algorithmic consciousness. A qualitative and comparative analysis of three emblematic cases, #MeToo, Fridays for Future, and Black Lives Matter, highlights emancipatory potentials (global amplification, rapid coordination, symbolic pressure) as well as structural vulnerabilities (dependence on algorithmic visibility, risk of slacktivism, corporate co-optation). The study shows how the same technological infrastructure that enables collective mobilization also functions as a space of surveillance, manipulation, and co-optation, thereby reshaping the relationship between movements, platforms, and institutions. The article argues for a continuous conceptual renewal: the classics should not be abandoned but reinterpreted in the light of the network society and surveillance capitalism. The three proposed categories aim to provide analytical tools to grasp the tensions between emancipation and control and to imagine hybrid strategies capable of translating the fluid energy of digital mobilization into lasting institutional change.