Futures of Learning

In the introduction to this blog series on new media practices in Brazil, I discussed how particular forms of new media embody the ethos of carnival, becoming a space where the norms of everyday life are suspended, reversed and reordered and people have a space to “forget” and reframe traditional boundaries and hierarchies. Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) have made a similar case in their working paper “Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism”. Drawing upon the Latin American context, the authors argue that the three forms of appropriation in the region can be applied to our conceptualization of innovation and appropriation of technology. As they describe,

“At one extreme, we find cannibalism, a radical physical reaction later transformed in a cultural program. Cannibalism is appropriation trough dismembering, absorption, and chemical transformation. It appears as a reference in a Brazil’s Ministry of Culture program conceived to encourage multimedia creativity and open source tweaking. At the opposite end, baroque is a reaction of the mind. It is the appropriation of spaces through filling and layering, and generally does not imply direct confrontation. An infiltration strategy, it begins by occupying the edges, continuing to fill-in the available spaces until it makes the center marginal. In-between, creolization is appropriation through miscegenation, and detour (roundabout), through unpredictable mixing. A process, more than a condition, it does not need to be confrontational but generally leads to new power arrangements.” (Bar, Pisani and Weber 2007:15)

Drawing upon recent scholarship by Brazilian scholars as well as the work by Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) and McCann (2008), throughout this blog series I have demonstrated how Brazilian’s new media practices reflect a commitment to the value of mixture, resistance and reversal. Examples of this include the Brazilian government’s receptivity to the integration of open source software use in the nations telecenters, the relatively laissez-faire attitude of the state towards piracy in relation to the video game industry as well as blogs, videos and sites such as Orkut and Overmundo to re-route traditional centers for the circulation and redistribution of new media. While this culture of resistance and rebellion may characterize many of the ways in which new media practices and discourse emerge, it is also evident that there are other media spaces where the freedom to experiment, explore and play in a carnival-esque fashion continues to be restricted, the barriers to participation reflecting long-standing hierarchies and inequalities. For example, the creative appropriation of the mobile phone whereby low income Brazilians return calls through the use of the local phone booth reflects as much of the forced creativity that undergirds everyday strategies to survive economically as it does the telecommunications industry to penalize Brazil’s poorest citizens through the extensive tariffs on calls for users of pre-paid plans. Similarly, Recuero (personal communication) notes that sites like Orkut are as much about the display of status and popularity as they are about sociality; upper class Brazilians rarely interact in a meaningful way with residents living in favelas even when they join in the same activity. In other words, and much like studies of the practice of carnaval in Brazil reveals (see Scheper-Hughes 1993, daMatta 1991, Lewis and Pile 1996), new media practices – even of the same media – are diverse and people in different social and economic locations throughout Brazil modes of engagement often reflect these inequalities, locations and dispositions which, in turn, engenders different meaning and interpretations of these practices.

In future research, the challenge will be to understand these practices within the particular social and historical conditions of Brazil as well as their significance in relation to other media practices throughout the world. There is much about about the Brazil case that reflects innovative, if not forward-looking, policies. For example the Brazilian government’s support of open source and Creative Commons, a distinct difference from the Indian government’s recent attempt to copyright traditional yoga poses. Yet, the efficacy of Brazil’s policies are also tied to a strong state that with prominent personalities, such as Gilberto Gil, driving these efforts. Now that Gil has stepped down and President Lula is facing the end of his term in the next few years, it is unclear the extent to which these policies will continue. At the level of research, there are definite ‘gaps’ in our knowledge of new media practices. My training as an anthropologist leads me to wonder more about the informal economy that has emerged around software, video games, mobile phones and new media production. I also want to know more about the practices that are connected to and supportive of people’s participation in Orkut, blogs, LAN houses, the remix of videos and other practices that are often rendered invisible, or partial, in these online milieu. Studies – ethnographic, qualitative and otherwise—of gaming are particularly absent despite Brazil’s rich gaming culture. It is clear that theoretically-driven empirical work needs to be done to extend and challenge existing understandings of new media participation.

A final note. In our early discussions of writing for this blog series, we expressed an explicit commitment to reading the research literature of local academics in the countries we wanted to explore in greater depth. Indeed, and with a few notable exceptions, much of what we know about new media practices in Brazil emerges from Brazilian scholars. The ability to engage in these literatures the span of days and months reflects the fact that many of the scholars involved study and participate in sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Orkut. Many scholars involved in internet and new media research also make a concerted effort to publish drafts of their work online on their blogs, personal websites and other sites in Portuguese and English. Although there are sites like Babelfish and other translation services to ease this burden, access to this material rests upon the good will, generosity and (importantly) the trust of “local” scholars to translate, share and even provide feedback on the interpretation of the innovative work that has not made its way through the lengthy peer review process and into journals and books. Over the next three weeks, Mimi Ito and Daisuke Okabe will continue to follow this commitment to understanding the national and transnational perspectives of new media practices in their co-authored blog series on the new media landscape in Japan.

References:
Bar, Francois, Francis Pisani and Matthew Weber. 2007. paper “Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism” May 15, 2007. Prepared for discussion at Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina. Convened by Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, April 20-21, 2007. http://arnic.info/Papers/Bar_Pisani_Weber_appropriation-April07.pdf, Accessed May 18, 2008.

DaMatta, Roberto. 1991. Carnivals, rogues and heroes. An interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Lewis, C and S. Pile. 1996. Woman, Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Volume 3, Number 1(1):23-42.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.