{"title":"Numbers as Fact-Icons: The Public Power of ‘6402’ in Post-War Colombia","authors":"Nicolás Rudas","doi":"10.1177/17499755241228040","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In 2021, the Peace Court of Colombia revealed that the national army had systematically executed 6402 innocent civilians, falsely presenting them as members of illegal armed groups. This revelation catapulted the number ‘6402’ into a prominent position within the country’s public discourse. I reconstruct the first six months of the figure’s dissemination, encompassing its coverage in both traditional and social media. In this analysis, I put forth a novel cultural-sociological conceptualization of numbers as ‘fact-icons’, departing from conventional views that regard statistics as purely technical entities. For wide segments of the Colombian public, ‘6402’ became a continuing political emblem not only because it reflected the magnitude of a real atrocity, but also due to factors of a more symbolic kind. First, the publication of the figure was constructed as a collective experience of ‘epiphany’ by journalists and media commentators. Second, it was infused with deep narratives of national identity by social movement activists. Lastly, it became a focal point of effervescent collective action through stylized aesthetic representations within the realm of popular art.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cultural Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755241228040","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 2021, the Peace Court of Colombia revealed that the national army had systematically executed 6402 innocent civilians, falsely presenting them as members of illegal armed groups. This revelation catapulted the number ‘6402’ into a prominent position within the country’s public discourse. I reconstruct the first six months of the figure’s dissemination, encompassing its coverage in both traditional and social media. In this analysis, I put forth a novel cultural-sociological conceptualization of numbers as ‘fact-icons’, departing from conventional views that regard statistics as purely technical entities. For wide segments of the Colombian public, ‘6402’ became a continuing political emblem not only because it reflected the magnitude of a real atrocity, but also due to factors of a more symbolic kind. First, the publication of the figure was constructed as a collective experience of ‘epiphany’ by journalists and media commentators. Second, it was infused with deep narratives of national identity by social movement activists. Lastly, it became a focal point of effervescent collective action through stylized aesthetic representations within the realm of popular art.
期刊介绍:
Cultural Sociology publishes empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous papers, which explore from a broad set of sociological perspectives a diverse range of socio-cultural forces, phenomena, institutions and contexts. The objective of Cultural Sociology is to publish original articles which advance the field of cultural sociology and the sociology of culture. The journal seeks to consolidate, develop and promote the arena of sociological understandings of culture, and is intended to be pivotal in defining both what this arena is like currently and what it could become in the future. Cultural Sociology will publish innovative, sociologically-informed work concerned with cultural processes and artefacts, broadly defined.