Traditional and Independent Media in the Brazilian Public Sphere on the Age of Crisis, Social Media and the Precariat

Home , Corporate social media, Independent media, Livres (movement)

Traditional and Independent Media in the Brazilian Public Sphere On the age of crisis, social media and the precariat

MA Thesis Name of author: Lucas Pascholatti Carapiá Student number: 640146 Track: Global Communication Department of Culture Studies School of Humanities August 2017 Supervisor: Piia Varis Second reader: Jan Blommaert Table of Contents

1) INTRODUCTION ...... 6 2) METHODOLOGY ...... 8 A) Max Horkheimer and Rationality in the Contemporary Social Philosophy – Criticism regarding the empirical analytical method ...... 8 B) Key Events and Data Collection ...... 9 C) Critical Online Ethnography ...... 12 3) THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ...... 14 A) Public sphere, the utopia and ideology behind it ...... 14 B) Communicative capitalism and the public sphere ...... 16 C) Crisis of welfare, financialist-technology and the precariat of 21st century ...... 19 D) From utopia to reality: what is the Web 2.0 ...... 24 4) THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT ...... 26 A) Communication in 20th-Century Brazil ...... 26 B) The rise of the Internet and Social Media ...... 30 5) INDEPENDENT MEDIA ...... 33 The case of Jornalistas Livres and Mídia Ninja ...... 33 A) Jornalistas Livres ...... 35 B) Media Ninja...... 37 C) Key Events - General Strike of 29th April 2017 ...... 40 6) DISCUSSION AND OBSERVATION ...... 44 7) ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND CORPORATIVE CAPITALISM IN SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS ...... 48 8) CONCLUSION ...... 50 APPENDIX ...... 53 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 54

Preface

This thesis was written for the master track in Global Communication, Cultural Studies, at Tilburg University, Netherlands. It was supervised by professor Piia Varis, from the same department. The investigation and writing process of this thesis occurred throughout 2017. Though data collection and literature review have started during the master courses, from August 2016.

It is recommended to read this thesis in digital format (such as .pdf), as the number of links attached in footnotes can serve as an extension of the content itself, as extra information and explanation to a non- Brazilian public. Some of the references cited are available only in Portuguese, but most of them were oriented to an English speaker public. Those who are only available in Portuguese can be translated by online tools as an auxiliary method to understand this thesis and all its data available, at least those who are textual. Some videos available on YouTube platform have automatic subtitles mechanisms that can help better understand the content available.

This thesis uses the Brazilian context and its public sphere from a writer who spent most of his life in this country and acted politically inside that context; therefore, needless to say that this thesis will be biased in many different aspects, especially when it comes to political points of view. Moreover, the context of Brazilian political struggles and social class clashes can be atypical for a European Dutch reader, thus it is important to advise that all the information should be put in its precise context, within its limitations of a country built as a Portuguese colony in the Americas. A nation-state that spent most of the twentieth century governed by authoritarian regimes with no interest in developing massive democracy or civic culture. Just recently Brazil reduced its social inequalities, but the economy is still more and more concentrated on the hands of a few corporation, as much as the political powers that currently governs executive, legislative and judiciary.

This thesis was also written following the parliamentary coup d’état suffered by the re-elected president Dilma Rousseff on her second mandate. Thus, much of the facts and information added here were written while Brazil was experiencing lots of political changes, though not for the better. Not only Brazil, but the whole international, social, political and economic scenarios have not been the most favourable since the international crisis of 2008. This thesis and all its content ought to be analysed taking into consideration this international crisis with all the elements that belong to it, such as precariat workers, massive unemployment, migration, superdiversity and populist extreme politicians that benefit from a post-truth democracy and all the disadvantages of means communication we are dealing with.

Disregarded all the differences and the Brazilian study case, this thesis aims to be inserted into a global context of a transnational public sphere, that does not limit itself inside specific national borders, to nationalities or their specific languages. Therefore, this thesis pretends to also serve as a global analysis of our digital media context, the multiple limitations and opportunities provided by traditional and new means of communication on the current wave of globalization with all challenges we’re dealing with.

Rotterdam,

28th August, 2017

Lucas Pascholatti Carapiá

Abstract

This master thesis presents the research about current communication context world widely by using critical theory and online ethnography. It looks forward analysing the role of new means of communication inside the transnational public sphere and its local contexts, using Brazil as a study case. Moreover, this thesis aims to study the impact of ideological factors in new media, such as Web 2.0, neoliberalism and social media networks. It pretends to show how those new media, represented by social media networks, can impact communication, behaviour, power and political activism. There is a dilemma imposed by cyber utopianism and totalitarian practices imposed by social media networks, with their limitations and opportunities, therefore they should be studied critically. Regarding opportunities offered by new means of communication, this study will use the case of citizen journalism exercised online by social media network, thus the case from two independent media groups in Brazil, such as Mídia Ninja and Jornalistas Livres, will be used as an illustration about how independent media groups act politically and what are the limitations they are immersed in. In addition, there is the discussion over public policies or the lack of them and how it impacts democracy and communication.

1) INTRODUCTION

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable. (VIII)

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History. 1940

For Bayn and Markham in Internet Inquiry (2009: vii), every generation believes it is singular in its experience of rapid and monumental social and technological changes. For the generation born in the 90s, the internet is not simply a banal means of communication; for them it emerged and grew up as a widespread way to find solutions to simple problems, communicate, get informed and help them act in decision-making problems, on a vast network of subcultures. Moreover, this generation saw the internet emerging from a slow, non-organized way to socialize and share files in a web - from a big Tube Monitor using Windows 98 and dial-up connection from free providers to a handy Android smartphone with a 4g connection - into a high speed controlled and surveilled internet1, in an age of Big Data. They saw a society informed by TV, newspapers and radio shift to an on-line one, where all the means of communication would merge into a single online way to find information, learn, produce and “consume” culture, and to establish communicative bonds with acquaintances through anonymous chats and later by social media networks. This phenomenon where new means of communication emerged has brought new opportunities as much as dozens of new problems together with it - the same has happened in the past with the printing press, television, radio, cinema or telephones (Van Dijck, J. 2013).

Therefore, it is crucial for those born within this generation to report their own observation about this process. This generation, differently from those yet to come, can report on the genesis of a growing widespread internet as a means of communication in a global scale, detailing the opposing forces witnessed in this world, as much as the ideological hype or utopia surrounding the empowering benefits

1 On Big Data, see Tricia Wang: How to Avoid Curses in the Era of Big Data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=860aspvsS1E

6 of the internet as a technology that once reached a peak and that nowadays is slowly declining, called cyberutopia.

Yet, the internet as a global phenomenon is not the same in all nation-states. Therefore, an analysis of the use of the internet as a means of communication should be well geo-localised, as the way the internet is used in Brazil differs from the way it is used in China, Russia, India, Europe or the USA. Thus, this thesis research will focus on the use of the internet from a Brazilian perspective. The internet has emerged in Brazil in the 90s and became widely used around the early 2000s as a way to establish in the public sphere alternative ways to communicate, entertain oneself and for subcultures to interact outside the traditional TV, news or radio systems, where the power of creation was centred in the user itself, rather than a media company with their commercial interests.

Methodologically, this thesis research is based on the idea that a research should be critical, using qualitative methods of empirical research, taken from the critical theory tradition (Horkheimer, 1931 and 1968), and ethnography, especially one that takes the online world and its impacts on the current offline society as well as its role in the public sphere as its subject of research (Hine, 2015).

Moreover, it bases itself on the fact of the precariat being the new international social class (Standing, 2012; Braga, 2012), which is a product of neoliberalism and financial capitalism that emerged in the late twentieth century and that generated unstable social systems, with the destruction of the welfare state and the financialization of global economy. There is also now a high mobility of transportation and people, generating super-diverse societies (Vertovec, 2007), with flexible jobs and high unemployment, where citizens submit themselves to different alternatives of income and political orientations to deal with it, which in general denies the globalization process from the late second decade of the millennium. Therefore, the theory regarding the precariat is essential for this study. The current users of the internet, social media platforms and those in jobs related to new technologies in general are largely part of the same precariat.

It is well known that communication in the public spheres, and for the political participation in current modern democracies, the communicative action is also being guided by the use of new (social) media, such as Twitter, Facebook or other social networks. Each new election and social-political occurrences are wildly discussed online in those spaces. Therefore, each year the role of new media is more important to citizenship and to the public sphere. However, social networks and new ways of producing media are not non-profit, accountable, organizations that seek for a more democratic and emancipated society through

7 the sharing of knowledge and public information, organization of protests and debates. They are big corporate organizations interested in raising profits for their investors in accordance with the brand of a neoliberal ideology of this interconnected society.

Thus, a main motivation for this thesis is to analyse the connection between neoliberalism and the current new media (van Dijck, José 2013), which is best represented by the Web 2.0 phenomenon that emerged in the early 2000s. The focus is to explain what transformed the internet into its current state of corporate communicative capitalism (Dean, 2003). The objective is to link neoliberalism with new media, represented by social networks and how this affects the behaviour of users, especially in their political actions in democratic regimes. The thesis wants to ask if the connection between neoliberal practices and new media leads to totalitarian practices (Morozov, 2011) and serve as an obstacle to social emancipation, as opposed to a cyber-utopic and idealistic point of view on what those new media are for certain activists and journalists. Culture, in this thesis, refers to political culture, or citizen or civic culture (Almond & Verba, 2015), where means of communication are a way to mediate this culture in the public sphere, via communicative action. The offline and online worlds will not be studied separately as it is important to analyse society as a whole structure, with the social status and post-modern struggles of for instance gender, race and LGBT movements as part of the political manifestation exhibited inside those virtual spaces. This thesis also wants to analyse the public sphere and how it is impacted by virtual spaces.

The behaviour of users, especially those who express themselves politically can be uncritical regarding new media, especially when their political behaviour tends to be ideological/utopian regarding virtual spheres. The thesis will also study some alternatives to traditional oligopolistic media and discuss how independent media groups appropriate those corporate spaces and seek to use them as ratchet effects for social emancipation, for activists and citizens in democracies.

2) METHODOLOGY

A) Max Horkheimer and Rationality in the Contemporary Social Philosophy – Criticism regarding the empirical analytical method

In Kritische Theorie (1968), Max Horkheimer builds a reflexion upon the contemporary philosophy and rationalism, associated with the French school of positivism in social sciences from the 19th century. He claims that the rational philosophy, a tradition started by René Descartes can be classified as the traditional bourgeois philosophy of the past centuries. His claim is that this kind of philosophical

8 framework, the rational, is best suited for the non-social sciences, or sciences of nature. For him, only a true dialectical analysis of society is good enough to explain the uniqueness of human societies and their social behaviour. Most of all, social philosophy must be emancipatory and critical, such as Marx advocates in German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach. Horkheimer (1968) discloses all the fragile elements of the bourgeois rational tradition and how it just seeks to explain the status quo without aiming to change it at all.

One of his main points is that there is no pure neutrality in quantitative research as their defenders claim. With so much oppression, domination, struggles of power, class, gender, races et al. in the world, when one researcher simply advocates to analyse society with a distant outlook and empirical-analytical data collected, mainly supported by statistics, he or she is not being neutral, but giving static frameworks of society that do not aim to change the status quo, but just reinforce it. Every researcher starts with a bias and will always end up confirming it whether he or she wants it or not. If there is a supposed neutrality, this one would only defend the status quo, and by supporting it, there are no social changes occurring as a product of social empirical researches. Therefore, social philosophy would be pointless if it presupposes neutrality. Social scientists must be aware of all the criticism involving the positivist theory and its effects on the results of humanistic research, whether they engage with critical theory, ethnography, empirical- interpretative research or not.

This thesis research, therefore, follows the tradition of critical theory to advocate that it is necessary to develop social analysis based on its praxis. Thus, by doing that, it helps create a setting that denies the current status in order to allow a new and more prosperous one to emerge. By showing the history of Brazilian media ecology in its current context, this thesis does not propose to observe it neutrally but to engage on the debate that aims to deny it for future developments. Appropriate academic analysis of a media setting that lacks democracy is an important way to help Brazilian society emancipate itself from those long-lasting patrimonialist and democratic deficits that consume its people to high poverty, racism and sexism that aims to only maintain the power of a few old oligarchies in power until today.

B) Key Events and Data Collection

As a methodology for research and data collection, this thesis uses literature review, reports and hard data from sociology, media ecology research, critical theory and political science regarding social media use in the public sphere, as much as about the social-political and economic context of Brazilian society as a whole.

For further details about the specific case studies of political organization inside the public sphere, thourgh the use of social media networks and the internet, online ethnography was applied as a method (Hine, 2015). The case studies observed were Independent Journalist groups that act inside Brazilian public sphere and incorporate the use of social media platforms as a way to spread their journalistic content, and especially reporter coverage of manifestations, cultural and public acts realized in society, opposed to the big oligopoly of commercial journalist groups that basically have ignored and manipulated audio- visual coverage of politics in Brazil for around 50 years and nowadays use the internet as a platform (van Dijk. T, 2016).

The observations using online ethnography took place during the years of 2016 and 2017, mostly on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and individual news websites. The two biggest independent journalist groups observed were Jornalistas Livres (from 2015) and Mídia Ninja (from 2011). Both were launched after some years from the emergence of big social media groups in Brazil (ranking the most accessed websites for Brazilians, Figures 7 and 82) and that got bigger after the protests of June 2013, the 2014 World Cup and presidential elections, that were followed by intense manifestations from both left wing to right wing groups from 2015 onwards (which were also inflamed by traditional media and oligarchies – van Dijck. Teun, 2016). In 2016 Brazil experienced a parliamentary coup3 manipulated by the media grooup Globo and traditional political groups and TV channels. This situation has made progressive groups and political activism in social media a main source of independent information inside the public sphere.

The choice for both groups as case studies was based on their relevance as citizen journalism (Goode, 2009) belonging to the independent and alternative media in Brazil. As democracy of means of communication is a delicate issue in Brazil, the choice for two groups that are active in the promotion of independent citizen journalism and within creating an opposed narrative of both cultural and political facets of Brazilian society is justified. The internet has allowed the possibility for journalists living in the age of precariat to assume more direct roles without the need to be hired by big and traditional media groups. There is a high demand for trustworthy independent media in Brazil, and as both the groups appeared to fulfil this demand they therefore serve as important case studies for this thesis research.

2 “Brazilians are heavy users of social media and user-generated content platforms, with Facebook and YouTube being the second and fourth most accessed URLs in September 2013, according to Alexa. In December 2012, Brazilians averaged 579 minutes a week on social networks, considerably above the global average of 383.3 minutes, according to comScore data.” Mapping Digital Media Brazil, 2013. Open Society Foundation. 3 For more news information on English see The Intercept, by Glenn Greenwald: https://theintercept.com/2016/06/30/major-new-brazil-events-expose-the-fraud-of-dilmas-impeachment-and- temers-corruption/

The manifestations offline and online are closely connected and they depend on each other directly, in a context of absence of democracy in means of communication and no regulation for media whatsoever. The organization Reporters without Borders wrote a report entitled “Brazil, a country of 30 Berlusconis”4, showing how media impact the public sphere in Brazilian society. There are also the publications from the NGO Article 19 Brazil, called “Violações à Liberdade de Expressão (Violation to the Freedom of Expression) – Annual Report 2015”5 and Mapping Digital Media Brazil, published by the Open Society Foundation6. The reports show both the state of Brazilian media landscape as much as its human rights violations, having media reporters as one main target. Therefore, what is left for the progressive and intellectual precariat in Brazil is to seek refugee inside big social media networks as a way to dialogue and share political content outside the traditional groups or small elitist left-wing newspapers or niche magazines. In the current media context, subcultures seek for symbolic expression online (Du, 2016).

In order to observe how those groups behave on social media, live streams of protests and YouTube interviews, where activist journalists record manifestations and share them online on social media as a way to oppose the coverage made by big groups, were chosen as data. Key livestreams were watched of specific political manifestations in Brazil during 2016 and 2017. This allows for an important analysis of the culture produced inside the Brazilian public sphere and its presence online as a way to mediate the public sphere.

The choice for Facebook livestreams and posts, YouTube, websites, and Instagram coverage from both groups as analysed data was made as a consequence of the use both groups make of social media networks as a way to share their content. Brazilians are very active social media users, therefore the appropriation of them by independent media groups can be dealt as natural. Moreover, as the thesis itself was written in the Netherlands, the only possible way to follow big protests happening inside Brazil was by following such groups on social media and their livestream coverage. As it is known and has been previously stated, the situation of freedom of press and democracy of media is a delicate issue in Brazil and is severely manipulated and edited by big traditional media groups. Therefore, it is possible for big protests such as the general national strike of 28th April 2017 to be ignored by those groups the evening before, as much as protests linked to the Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 or being in favour of

4 https://rsf.org/en/reports/brazil-country-thirty-berlusconis 5 http://artigo19.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/24/files/2016/05/Relat%C3%B3rio-ARTIGO-19- Viola%C3%A7%C3%B5es-%C3%A0-Liberdade-de-Express%C3%A3o-2015.pdf (in Portuguese) 6 Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/projects/mapping-digital-media

11 accusing Lula da Silva of corruption in 2017 to be highly covered by the same groups when it is linked with their political, ideological and economic agenda (van Dijk. Teun, 2016).

Thus, livestream coverage by such independent media groups ends up serving as the only unbiased way to follow political protests in real time overseas, as much as for collection of unbiased denoucements of police brutality or non-hegemonic point of views belonging to left-wing politicians or social movement leaders.

A single key event was chosen that represents a telling case for the whole process of observation and data collection throughout 2016-2017, considering its relevance and national political impact. The general strike of 28th April 2017 that occurred after the coupist-President Michel Temer was nationally exposed to be linked with corruption scandals7 represents this key event. Information regarding this key event and how the independent journalistic collectives acted in site and made a livestream coverage of a march that walked from Largo da Batata in São Paulo to the house of Michel Temer will be discussed. Moreover, those citizen journalistic groups are not limited to livestream activities; therefore, it will be showed how they acted from morning to evening during the strike, showing what happened in site, differently from what was represented by the traditional media groups.

However, it is important to keep a critical approach toward social media groups and how they can influence, profit off and affect public sphere dialogues online. In order to get trustworthy information which allows oneself to engage actively in the public sphere it is necessary to have a Facebook or Twitter account, which is problematic in many ways, especially when it comes to accountable democratic terms. There is no accountability inside social media groups as it is evidenced by critical researchers about digital activism, like Evgeny Morozov (2011)8. Therefore, it is necessary to make some critical observations about the efficacy of using social media for digital activism or by independent journalistic groups and how it can impact the public sphere in general, in opposition to a cyber-utopianism ideology.

C) Critical Online Ethnography

Qualitative approaches are open ended. In a media-saturated society, with ever shifting sociocultural contexts, the ethnographic study of online behaviour is an appropriate choice (Markham & Baym, 2009). Moreover, online ethnography allows us to understand how people make sense of their lives (Hine, 2015).

7 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/27/brazils-president-michel-temer-charged-over-alleged- corruption 8For more information concerning Morozov’s research, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyueJJbnzPg&t=974s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hFk6FDrZBc

The ethnographer, while doing his/her observation, focuses on a holistic understanding of specific groups. Thus, ethnography seems well suited to giving answers on how lives are lived and how technologies are adopted and adapted to our lives. Qualitative research offers a close analysis that is followed by interpretation. Another advantage offered by this method is that it can reconsider past theories without reinventing them and simply assuming that method is purely a means to a final argument.

Online ethnography is derived from the traditional modes of ethnography, with their roots in anthropology, started by scholars such as Malinowski (1922) or Franz Boas (1938). However, for its online part, it goes from non-mediated face-to-face interaction to mediated interaction. Hine (2015) argues that mediated communication should not be rejected as inappropriate or insufficient as a medium to conduct ethnography. This doesn’t jeopardise the process of collecting data through ethnography, neither the holistic approach offered by ethnography as a method. After all, ethnography is highly necessary for understanding the internet in all its depth and details. As also stated by Hine (2015), online ethnography is an ethnography for the internet and not of the internet, as it is impossible to grasp the internet as an individual entity rather than as a simple means of communication.

This thesis advocates for a critical online ethnography (Creswell, 2013: 94). Thus, issues of power, empowerment, inequality, dominance, repression, hegemony and victimization will be taken in focus. This study aims to empower people and the field of research on communication to challenge the forces of status quo and address concerns regarding power and control.

This thesis aims to use critical online ethnography to study how the independent media groups behave in social network platforms as a way to spread their journalistic coverage and news to ordinary citizens or independent journalists and activists in a context that lacks democracy in means of communication. It aims to give independent media groups voice and identity, in order to help the fight for democracy for means of communication in Brazil, opposed to the traditional oligopoly of media controlled by a few families resulting from centuries of history of patrimonialism and the imbalance of power in Brazil (Faoro, 1958). This study relies on online ethnography including detailed analysis of present-day Brazil provided by socio-political studies and reports about the use of media, and society and politics. The analysis is also supported by the analysis of journalistic articles and other online material.

3) THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

A) Public sphere, the utopia and ideology behind it

The ideas of ‘private’ (market and family) and ‘public’ (state) have been a constant in political theory. The idea of a public sphere, as theorized by Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, has started a long debate on what is the public sphere as well as the ideology behind this idea. Some of the literature even questions its possibility in the contemporary society, especially when considering the online platforms (Dean, 2003; Papacharissi, 2002). The idea of public and private is impacted by the internet as it disrupts the limits of social boundaries. As the world of personal identities and what is unveiled for intimacy is blurred, so is the notion of public space or a possible public sphere as well (Markham & Baym, 2009). A person who is sharing their private moments on Instagram or Facebook doesn’t limit his or her private issues with those who are present with them in real time, but potentially for a big amount of followers that can even be on the other side of the globe.

When talking about participatory democracy, one always remembers the ancient Greek democracy, of the agoras and the demos, where citizens would gather to express their political opinions. They would agree or disagree with each other and try to develop what would be a consensus, based on dissent in their debate. Habermas calls the act of agreeing and disagreeing communicative action. In other words, this refers to the expressions of citizens’ ideas in real time confrontation, where one expresses his/her opinion and is responded to by others. Habermas also analyses the role of the bourgeois public sphere in the 17/18th-century Germany, where men from different social backgrounds would gather in coffee houses and have political discussions in a “fair and equalitarian environment”, as it was done in the Greek agoras. Of course, this first bourgeois public sphere was directly related to the first mass means of communication, such as the printing press, as Hobsbawm emphasises in The Age of Revolutions (1962). The emergence of one bourgeois public sphere in these centuries is important in explaining many social revolutions that were the basis for the modern era.

The classical theory of the public sphere, by Habermas, is a nation-centred theory (Fraser, 2014). All the aspects of the Westphalian framework are embedded in this classical theory: the state-nation, the idea of one culture, one language, one nation, one economy and one mass media. According to Fraser, we should instead consider an international public sphere that goes beyond the nation-state centred one.

Therefore, she claims a post-Westphalian public sphere which has the internet as its most advanced real- time communication tool. In the same way, as she had claimed in Rethinking the Public Sphere (1990), the idea of a public sphere should be that of multiple ones; while Habermas proposed the bourgeois public sphere, we should also claim the subaltern public spheres, such as the women’s, the racial public spheres, the LGBT one, those of immigrants and so on and so forth.

For Dean (2003) the public sphere “is the site and subject of liberal democratic practice, it is that space within which people deliberate over matters of common concern, matters that are contested and about which it seems necessary to reach a consensus” and she claims that the public sphere should also be reflected as an ideology, invoking Slavoj Zizek’s idea of ideology9 (Zizek, 1994).

Most of the utopian ideologists of the public sphere started to apply this theory to the development of innovative technologies of communication that were appropriated by the first anarchistically inclined groups of cyberactivists, pirates and cyber-anarchists (Silveira, 2010). Around the beginning of the 21st century most of these groups succeeded in electronic civil disobedience (ECD), as stated by Creative Arts Ensemble (CAE, 1999, in Next Five Minutes 310), a collective that claimed direct intervention and civil disobedience in the cyberworld. Those groups, such as CAE, claimed that the public sphere would be driven by what takes place on the internet. Also, CAE claims that this should be done in a clandestine way, as they were aware of online surveillance.

According to Papacharissi (2002), the expression of a political opinion online may leave one with a feeling of empowerment. The power of words and their ability to effect change, however, is limited in the current political situation. In a political system where the role of the public is limited, the effect of these online opinions on policy-making is questionable. The idea of an internet-based debate is also questionable, and the necessary communicative action as proposed by Habermas hardly works on Facebook. Face-to-face communication with its ethical relations is necessary when having a real debate (Miller, 2016), so that the ideally conceived power of the best argument would win without interference from behaviours caused by the lack of physical presence. It appears that only when equals share a face-to-face conversation it is possible to have communicative action towards a consensus.

9 As theorized by Slavoj Zizek, ideology refers to the “generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and the non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes in this relationship.” 10 https://issuu.com/odaconnexio/docs/critical_art_ensemble__electronic_c

We can think about, as an example, student movement assemblies, or workers’ unions voting whether to enter a strike or not, or when to leave the same strike. In micro-spaces such as such assemblies we can see the public sphere working as it was conceived, but the same cannot applied to fragmented networks on the Web. Papacharissi (2002) affirms that the internet allows us to shout loudly, but whether others will listen, beyond the few individuals who may reply, is questionable, and whether our words will make a difference is even more in doubt.

If we think about, for instance a Facebook timeline, the famous echo chamber11, we see that social media communication is fragmented in nature. Groups with mutual interests are algorithmically gathered on Facebook. Apart from group fragmentation, and that you are shouting out loudly to people who share the same opinion, also the massive amount of information encountered within a small amount of time is fragmented on Facebook’s newsfeed. We have algorithmically assembled opinions or factoids.

Papacharissi (2002) affirms that we have “bits without organic integrity”. Also, when individuals address different topics, in a random order, without a commonly shared understanding, everything becomes even more fragmented and its impact is mitigated. The ability to discuss any political subject, drifting in and out of discussions and topics on whim can be very liberating, but it does not create a common starting point for political discussion. Ultimately, there is a danger that these technologies may overemphasize our differences and downplay or even restrict our commonalities, as evidenced by the echo chamber effect caused by algorithms. As a result, social media users are merely passive workers for a profit-driven content generation machine.

B) Communicative capitalism and the public sphere

Mass media always evokes a fictional entity called “the public opinion”. This, helped by statistical research, would supposedly be able to express what is the majoritary opinion. The so-called public opinion can be a challenge to political forces and in fact is as an argument used by the powers that be, such as the corporate conservative media and traditional politicians. “The public opinion is with us”, politicians would claim in the Brazilian National Congress in their speeches, when voting for Dilma Roussef’s impeachment process or for the lowering of minimum penal age from 18 to 16 years, while showing in their hands the newspapers that corroborate with their argument.

11 https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-echo-chamber/

Dean (2003) discusses communicative capitalism, supported by Manuel Castells’ (1998) arguments. It is a useful theory that explains the powers in control of social media and the internet. Communicative capitalism represents an obstacle to political progress and emancipation where democracy in relation to the means of communications is limited or barely regulated by the public powers. Consequently, mass media represents the interests of corporations as much as it profits from the commerce of information and culture.

This is central for the neoliberal ideology of consumerism due to which in corporate mass means of communication one will rarely see critical dissent challenging the establishment or the status quo. Most of the time an individual is bombarded with advertisements. This can cause problems regarding the visibility of women, for example, and their representation. The same problem is doubled when it comes to racial issues.

A big discussion regarding advertising and big media groups has to do with post-feminism and the misogynic ways in which women are usually represented in the media (Gill, 2007), as journalist Vanessa Barbara explains in her article12 in the New York Times about Globo media group in Brazil: “The rest of the evening was filled with soap operas, from which you could learn that women always wear heavy makeup, huge earrings, polished nails, tight skirts, high heels and straight hair. (On those counts, I guess I’m not a woman). Female characters are good or bad, but unanimously thin. They fight one another over men. Their ultimate purposes in life are to wear a wedding dress, give birth to a blond-haired baby or appear on television, or all the above. Normal people have butlers in their homes, where hot male plumbers visit and seduce bored housewives.” Also for this reason corporate media do not represent the public; they are not the public sphere.

The use of public opinion as an argument has always the hands of editors on it, which are certainly not neutral, and want to align the information broadcasted to the corporations’ interests, and this can include being against certain protests and policies that benefit minorities, and they can even contribute to the elections of certain candidates rather than others. Corporate mass media is directly connected to advertisers and certainly they don’t want to publish news that might be against certain wealthy groups willing to sponsor their outlets, even if they are gun, tobacco or alcohol industries.

12 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/opinion/international/escaping-reality-with-brazils-globo-tv.html?_r=0

Considering the current reality of easy access to new media and technologies such as the internet, the spread of social media and mass communication pages such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, one could affirm that the public is appropriating these new corporative means of communication, producing and sharing their own information; thus, freeing themselves from the hands of traditional mass media, using emancipatory means of political discussion enabled by the internet where face-to-face contact is not needed and ample access to information is guaranteed.

Other could also argue that, differently from the traditional means of communication, social media and the internet enable citizens to be in control of what is shared or posted. Or that it is a dialogical way of getting useful information, because it also enables sharing and giving visibility to subalterns. Users however communicate in social media controlled by the biggest corporations, which induce them to engage in behaviours such as massively clicking the “like” button to make some contents more profitable than others. It's important to emphasise that those corporations use and sell our personal information for profit as much as they are profiting from the content we're sharing inside their networks. Users of social media act as much as human experiments of big data.

Communicative capitalism is embedded in big internet portals (Yahoo, Google, etc) and social media, but users appear to be ideologically blind to it. There are, however, some cases of struggle against it, such as the Creative Arts Ensemble, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, Creative Commons 13 , Pirate Bay, Laws of Civic Regulation of Internet (such as L.12.965 in Brazil 14 ), The Flok Society 15 and the Open Government Partnership16 initiative, as some examples. We can find numerous independent media groups that work together with social media and outside it. Famous cases (further explained below) are Mídia Ninja17 and Jornalistas Livres18, from Brazil. The process of privatisation of the internet by companies and governments therefore doesn't happen without contestation.

It is also important to address here the term “slacktivism” (Morozov 2011), that can illustrate some of the behaviour regarding citizenship and social media. For the slacktivists19 social media can be an exhaust valve to politically conciliate themselves without having to make the effort of leaving their homes,

13 https://creativecommons.org/ 14 http://direitorio.fgv.br/noticia/the-brazilian-civil-rights-framework-for-the-internet 15 http://commonstransition.org/flok-society/ 16 https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ 17 https://ninja.oximity.com/ 18 https://jornalistaslivres.org/ 19 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism

18 occupying the public space and engaging in face-to-face interactions with other citizens. The internet, for slacktivists, is a tool that provides them with the ability to share and produce political content, without really having to engage themselves in deep long-lasting discussions about political matters in bars, cafés, rallies, protests or squares.

The internet provides users with the illusion that they are part of one dialogical public sphere which can allow them to achieve political emancipation. Expressing oneself as a citizen has started to be equated with expression on social media. The example of changing profile pictures on social media in solidarity in the context of political disputes is an example of this.

C) Crisis of welfare, financialist-technology and the precariat of 21st century

Neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards has deregulated the welfare-state in such a way that workers started to be ripped off their own fundamental social rights in a market economy context, as defended by the Fordist model in the early 20th century. Therefore, unemployment and poor working contracts have shifted the working conditions in contemporary times. More workers started to shift from regular full- time assalariat working conditions to part-time and flexible working status, that flirt directly with unemployment (Standing, 2011).

Guy Standing explains how this shift to neoliberalism helped craft a new global class structure called the precariat, which is quite unlike what prevailed during the 20th century marked by welfare state policies, especially in the US and in many European countries. However, for the sociologist of labour, Ruy Braga (2012), the condition of precariat is not merely an aberration of neoliberalism, but a consequence of the political dynamics of the capitalist modernity. According to him, the precariat is the precarious proletariat. The precariat condition is inherent to the working class, in the heart of capitalism. The precarious condition is a consequence of the inherent commoditisation of work.

This condition of the precariat causes the anguish of subalterns, or what Braga also calls, the plebeian pulse. This process is connected to the outsourcing of work, which he links to the regime of post-Fordist accumulation, the neoliberal privatisation and to financialization. The last one is linked to the services sector, which is responsible for hiring most of the young workers without previous experience with organised syndicalism. Braga associates this phenomenon to the post-industrial argument, which is directly linked to the concentration of economy in the services sector, as much as argued by the post- Fordist regime of accumulation theory.

Figure 1: This chart illustrates the wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S., from the 19th century to 2010, in a long- term perspective.

On the other hand, the economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, shows how the economy has become more concentrated in the hands of a few world oligarchies, as also stated by The World Economic Forum in Davos (2017)20. Piketty shows that there is an economic equation that r > g, which is explained by (r) being the rate of return on capital being greater than economic growth (g). His aim is to show the evolution of the capital for three centuries in USA and Europe with a focus on wealth and income inequality. The result of r > g is that, on the long term, bigger concentration of wealth will be generated, causing political disturbances of power and economic instability; in other words, the current economic reality marked by the precariat, or precarious proletariat as a dominant social class. Piketty proposes as a solution for this crisis the reformation of a global policy of taxation that would solve this concentration of wealth21, as showed by the charts made by John Cassidy, from the New Yorker magazine. Figure 1 illustrates the wealth inequality in Europe and in the USA from 1810-2010, evidencing the research made by Thomas Piketty. This data is supported by the other charts in Figures 2, 3, 4.

20 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same- wealth-as-poorest-50 21 https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts

Figure 2: This chart shows what’s been happening in six developing countries: Argentina, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, and South Africa. We see the familiar U shape: during the past few decades more income has been accumulating at the top.

What once represented safe working conditions that started with Fordism, now is marked by strong unemployment (as shown by Figure 5) and an array of non-wage forms of remuneration. Usually, highly educated professionals that live under unemployment or working conditions that do not match their high skills of education. This causes, then, a situation of status frustration, as mentioned by Standing (2014).

The precariat is explored inside and outside workplaces. No occupation narrative can be given to them. This is crucially what represents the working condition of Brazilian workers as showed by Ruy Braga (2012) and his studies about outsourced precariat from telecom companies in Brazil, usually having to keep up with high goals to achieve, as well as a low income of minimum salaries. As youngsters from peripheric neighbourhoods, they lack experience in organized work, as well as of syndicalisation, as a result from outsourced work. Braga associates this phenomenon of poor labour conditions to the post-Fordist regime, where there are neoliberal companies with deconcentrated production guided by the M – M’ equation, (M) being money generating money with surplus (M’). This causes financialization of the administration, plus outsourcing, plus individualization of work and thus an increased competition among workers themselves.

Figure 3: This chart shows the share of income taken by the one per cent richest from 1910-2010. This chart takes into consideration the share of top income percentile in total incomes, excluding capital gains and the share of top wage percentile in total wage bill.

This, together with a situation of global crisis, unemployment or underemployment, create a group of progressive citizens, with high level of education, that is willing to create and innovate with what they have, especially when it comes to political expression in a context of no or low democracy in means of communication. That is, where a few oligarchies own all the media spaces and use them to form a set of opinions to those who passively consume them. Therefore, the precariat is not exactly a united social class; in one side there are those highly educated, progressive and intellectualized, and on the other, there are unemployed, unskilled workers who are clearly manipulated inside the public sphere.

Some precariat tend for highly radical social-political changes, seeking to include and redevelop democracy in the 21st century, while others are called Atavists, who embrace populists and neo-fascist groups of all sorts. Both groups blame the current representative democracy and the old ways of doing politics. All of them are connected and use new tools of communication, i.e: social media websites controlled by those same richest millionaires discussed by Thomas Piketty in The Capital of the 21st Century, such as Mark Zuckerberg.

Braga criticises the argument of some sociologists who analyse this post-industrial condition, such as Manuel Castells and his idea of informacionism. In the 90s, jobs related to the information technology , what Braga relates to the post-fordist context, were associated to innovation, emancipation and complex

22 work conditions. Those jobs were considered to be autonomous work, done by highly qualified people, and focused on research, business and sales fields. All of them, associated with riches model of communication and development, oriented to the production of cultural assets. Those jobs were also related to affective relations, new and innovative forms of knowledge, such as evidenced by Wikipedia, for example. However, for Braga, and his ethnographic research on call centre outsourced workers from Brazil, this is far from the reality. The argument of informacionism and post-industrialism suggests that jobs related to technology help overcome the precariat condition, associating it to creativity and autonomy, from the tasks of planning and conceptualisation of products and process. But in fact, what we have is a despotic regime of accumulation, endorsed by Thomas Piketty’s arguments, and complex work is far from emancipation and indeed is not accessible to all, as proved by the high unemployment in the age of precariat.

Figure 4: This chart tracks the share of over-all income taken by the top ten per cent of households from 1910 to 2010. Broadly speaking, it’s centered on a U shape.

The situation of global crisis, flexible working conditions, outsourcing and high unemployment created a context where those new technologies that are in no way accountable start to serve for many people as ways to overcome the obstacles created by the global crisis. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb, for example, fill the space left by poor institutionalised services offered by both the nation-states as well as traditional private and stagnated groups. Moreover, the weak representative democracy, a consequence of a global socio-political and economic crisis, makes new technologies suitable for entertaining and filling

23 the promises of neoliberalism in a project of cyber-utopianism, where new technologies and the Silicon Valley corporations linked to it offer highly developed services for free, without need for taxes, in exchange of advertising and owning users’ personal data.

Figure 5: Unemployment, total (% of total labor force), Source World Bank22.

D) From utopia to reality: what is the Web 2.0

The concept of Web 2.0 is fundamental to understanding the current context of the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 was, at first, a project that aimed to introduce collaboration and cooperation as means to enhance the sharing of information within cyberspace. These projects of more “anarchical” ways of dealing with collaboration on the internet were absorbed by neoliberal forces that ended up being some of the richest contemporary enterprises: such as Facebook, Google and Twitter (van Dijck, 2013). Web 2.0 platforms’ focus is on the generation of data in a macroscale by their own users. Users are interconnected and interacting to form small communities. Collaborators inside those spaces, themselves, would presumably be empowered by their own generation of data.

Many scholars that investigate the Web 2.0, such as José van Dijk (2013), König (2013) and Morozov (2011), classify it as a utopian view from the beginning of the millennium. The 2.0 label seemed justified as the Web became more interactive (O’Reilly 2005). Many see it as a way to liberate users from traditional hierarchical ways of developing knowledge that hindered participation and dialogue. Theoretically, the Web 2.0 would lead citizens to actively contribute to cultural production regardless of their social status. Therefore, it is possible to find evidence of many different cultural phenomena that surround the use of

22 Available at: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?end=2016&start=1991&view=chart

Web 2.0 platforms, such as social media and the famous cases of memes in many different public spheres around the world.

According to the utopian view of Web 2.0 it is seen by many as democratizing and superior to traditional forms of organizing participation; however, in reality it mainly produces profit for the communicative capitalism (Dean, 2003) enterprises that benefit from all the utopia and data production behind it. Users are a means to an end, which is the production of data and ultimately of profit. Wikipedia or other Wiki23, differently than the other neoliberal appropriators of the Web 2.0 ideology, use the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ in a non-profitable way for accumulation of cultural information in a vast range of languages spoken globally. For the president of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Google and the galaxy of Wikis represent the myth of ‘Universal Knowledge’ which is directly linked to this utopian view of Web 2.0 as ideological (Adams, 2007).

Nonetheless, the reality of utopia is far from the truth. In countries where there is a lack of democracy in the means of communication, appropriating corporative social media starts to develop into a common ideological option for the means of social emancipation. Tools like Facebook or YouTube end up being appropriated by independent media groups to reach their objective of spreading trustworthy information. Considering the absence of appropriate regulation that could secure accountability, plurality and democratic access to means of communication as a public property, social media tools are appropriated by the public as alternatives, disregarding their private interests or consideration for accountable and transparent mechanisms of communication. The ideological mechanisms of Web 2.0 are thus not only accepted but also endorsed by emancipatory forces in society.

23 Many videogames players use the platform of Wiki to construct websites specialized on specific games such as Fallout: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki, Elder Scrolls: http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki and also Pokemon: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page.

4) THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT

A) Communication in 20th-Century Brazil

In the executive summary of the report Mapping Digital Media Brazil, published by the Open Society Foundation, they write: “Protests against traditional media groups such as Organizações Globo, Rede Record, and SBT also took place, due to both a perception that their coverage of the protests was biased, and a general dissatisfaction regarding the role of media in Brazil’s social and political life. In response, Globo went as far as apologizing in an O Globo editorial (31 August 2013), for having supported the 1964 military coup—an act that was described by one commentator as an attempt at rebranding”. This quotation shows that there is still a lot of resentment in Brazil against its authoritarian past and the consequences that it generated to its current media ecology and the power relations that exist in society as a consequence of the concentration of means of communication in the hands of a few groups, specifically to Globo group and its close connection to the military during the dictatorship. Thus, in order to better understand the media ecology and the socio-political context of present-day Brazil, it is fundamental to understand its history and how the public sphere has been informed in the past decades.

The Brazilian history in the second half of the 20th century cannot be explained without further understanding the military dictatorship period (1964-1985) and how it changed the way regular Brazilian citizens were informed in the period of an autocratic political regime, followed by the democratic period which started in 1985 with the first civilian president José Sarney24 elected indirectly after around 20 years. The democratic period of 1945-1964 was marked by short access to television as a means of communication; it was only in the 60s, a decade marked by the military coup of 1964, that the television as a means of communication started to be widespread, as showed by Mapping Digital Media Brazil: “Since the 1960s, free-to-air television has been the predominant source of news, entertainment, and culture for Brazil’s sizable population, and it continues to be the main source of information for most citizens. It is available in 98.3 percent of households, with Globo holding the highest audience ratings every year. Subscriptions for paid television are on the rise, growing constantly from 1998 to 2005, and substantially since 2005. Even so, by June 2012 there were only 14.5 million subscriptions to paid television services, in a country which had 190.7 million inhabitants in 2010.”

24 Ironically, affiliated to ARENA, the political party associated to the military in power, he is a well-known oligarch from the state of Maranhão.

After the military coup of 1964, the president and general Castelo Branco had granted public attribution of television for the businessman Roberto Marinho, owner of the Globo media group. Roberto Marinho, now with a television channel of his own, had not only newspapers, but also radio stations in his group’s possessions. Consequently, this business man has built a huge communication group in Brazil, with close ties with the military generals in power. The military regime in Brazil has committed a large amount of violations against human rights, involving massive homicide and torture against oppositionists, as showed by National Truth Commission, that only reported during president Dilma’s period (2010-2016). Those crimes were never punished and the military had negotiated general amnesty by the last years of the dictatorship, differently from other Latin American military dictatorships, such as in Argentina and Chile25. Therefore, the military regime, by giving control over TV to Roberto Marinho, were granted political support by the mass media, despite their autocratic and violent regime.

The military regime had performed widespread censorship after 1967, with the infamous AI-5, institutional act number 526, which restricted freedom of press. Globo media group established a certain kind of monopoly of information, for a conservative patrimonialist oligarchy of businessmen (Faoro, 1958). Audio-visual communication through radio and television had very little or almost no dissent regarding what the military government did. Audio-visual communication, for the generals, was a political tool in creating national identity and spreading political information aligned with their nationalistic ideology (Reporters without Borders – The Country of Thirty Berlusconis, 2013).

In 1993, a British documentary Beyond Citizen Kane27 directed by Simon Hartog and produced by John Ellis, firstly broadcasted by Channel 4, investigated the origins of the media network Rede Globo and their power to manipulate Brazilians with the monopoly of means of communication. This documentary has been censored in Brazil, over a dispute with Rede Globo about its content; however, it is available online and has been shared through pirate tapes. This documentary, with an allusion to Citizen Kane from Orson Welles, shows how Rede Globo managed to establish itself as the fourth power in Brazil. Since then, this documentary has been distributed illegally for almost 25 years.

After democracy was re-established resulting in the Federal Constitution of 1988, Rede Globo and the few oligarchies that retained the control of means of communication, maintained the status quo. Therefore,

25 See, National Truth Commission: http://www.cnv.gov.br/ (in Portuguese) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/10/brazils-torture-report-brings-a-president-to- tears/?utm_term=.56cdce159d0a 26 For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-5 27 Available on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLYVvUpMtp6cNnhJGUpjFB3bH7AYPKvcS

27 since the military period, Brazil has not experienced democracy of means of communication until today and this has caused many severe consequences for democracy in Brazil, including the parliamentary coup of 2016 as illustrated by Teun van Dijk in ‘How Globo media manipulated the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’ (2016).

Figure 6: Extracted from Mapping Digital Media Brazil. This graphic shows the most frequently viewed TV channels in Brazil, from 2009. Source: Datafolha, TV Brasil.

The British documentary shows how Globo has been deeply manipulating Brazilians, from politics to entertainment such as telenovelas to tons of advertising. The most infamous case of manipulation in the democratic period was during the election of 1989, where Rede Globo explicitly manipulated the debate between Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, the worker leader of the late 1970s strikes in the industrial Big ABC region of São Paulo and creator and leader of Partido dos Trabalhadores (Worker’s Party) until today, against the oligarch Fernando Collor de Melo. Morever, Rede Globo is also famous for fiscal evasion28.

In the 90s Globo maintained its power untouched, defending the neoliberal government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, from Brazilian Social Democracy Party29 (ironically Brazil’s best current representative of a conservative right-wing party regardless of its name). However, in 2002, Lula finally got elected as the

28 https://www.cartacapital.com.br/blogs/intervozes/por-que-a-divida-da-globo-nao-e-manchete-de-jornal- 670.html (In Portuguese) 29 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Social_Democracy_Party

Brazilian president, after trying since the first open elections of 1989. The Worker’s Party, the biggest left- wing party of Latin America30 got in power by allying with industrialist groups, with the plan to make the economy grow faster and allow workers to escape poverty by formal working conditions of employment plus constant rise of minimum wage, allowing them to enter consumerism, thus enhancing economic growth to the point of reaching the 6th richest economy of the world (Singer, 2012) with heavy participation of industrialists and a high rate of regular employment.

The regulation of TV channels is done by the republic’s president; however, Lula’s policy of non-conflicts with Brazilian patrimonialist oligarchies, left Rede Globo, as well as the policies for media concession, untouched and still financed by public money (Mapping Digital Media Brazil, 2013: 95). In other words, until today Brazil has not created a basis for the foundation of democracy of means of communication. This is explained carefully by the Non-Governmental Organization, Instituto Intervozes31.

Globo kept manipulating its vast audience, demonizing the Worker’s Party, Lula as president and associating them directly to all political scandals, leaving their allies untouched and creating the impression that the Worker’s Party is the only one responsible for the old problem of corruption. Their influence has just become stronger after the mensalão32 scandal of 2005 as emphasised by Teun van Dijk (van Dijk, 2016).

Lately, Rede Globo33 has been losing audiences to the other five corporate TV channels. Rede Record, the biggest, is controlled by Edir Macedo, a businessman and high priest of the globally established Universal Church, a conservative evangelical leader, widely criticized for charlatanism 34 . In general, Brazilian television has been highly oligopolistic35 since the 1960s. As showed by Figure 6, Rede Globo is still the most viewed TV channel in Brazil, followed by TV Record, from Edir Macedo.

30 With 1.586.521 affiliates according to the Supreme Electoral Court in August 15th 2017. 31 Levante Sua Voz, documentary released in 2010 by the Organization Intervozes, see on YouTube (In Portuguese): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSi5PhVb5og by Intervozes, http://intervozes.org.br/ 32A vote-buying scandal that threatened to bring down the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005. Mensalão is a neologism, a variant of the word for "big monthly payment". For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensal%C3%A3o_scandal 33 http://www.economist.com/news/business/21603472-brazils-biggest-media-firm-flourishing-old-fashioned- business-model-globo-domination 34 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/13/brazil-evangelical-leader-charged-fraud 35 https://issuu.com/rsf_webmaster/docs/brazil_eng

B) The rise of the Internet and Social Media

The rise of the internet changed the whole context of communication in Brazil. Brazilians started experiencing the internet on a large scale by the end of the 1990s. The first tools of communication, usually with dial-up connections offered by free providers, were the chat rooms, MSN messenger, ICQ, online forums, community websites, photologs and blogs, typical for what is now known as the Web 1.0.

Orkut36, the first widely used social media website in Brazil, founded in 2004 by the Turkish programmer Orkut Büyükkökten, later bought by Google, at first a small US/English-speaking community of invited users, was taken over by Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, as analysed by Fragoso (2006), in WTF a Crazy Brazilian Invasion. In this social media, it was possible to add friends, create your own network, leave comments on others’ pages, add pictures and participate in different “communities”. In general, Orkut was very much like a predecessor of Facebook.

Socio-economically and politically, Brazil experienced the period of Lula’s governments in 2002-2010 and the economic and human development growth related to the Worker’s Party governments. The country accomplished an increase in welfare state policies, which would also increase the strength of capitalism, in an economy based on construction, telecommunication and exportation of commodities. This would facilitate the acquirement of means of consumption for regular workers with the increase of the minimum wage, credit and social programs of income transference37, such as Bolsa Familia 38(Singer, 2012).

A new and massive middle class emerged with access to new technological apparatus, such as computers and smart phones. Both the socio-economic context and the previous fertile online experiences, caused a massive increase in social media users in Brazil. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, games and other social media have massive numbers of Brazilian users consuming everything that can be consumed on a daily basis, as showed by the graphic in Figure 7. Brazilians are one of the biggest groups on the internet; with 89 million users, 45% of the population, it ranks 9th in the world, and it has its own domain .br (introduced in 1989). A study conducted in 2004 by IBOPE/Netrating stated that Brazilians spent more time on the internet than the average American user (Mapping Digital Media Brazil, 2013).

According to a study published by the Open Society Foundation (2013), Mapping Digital Media in Brazil, regarding User-Generated Content (UGC), “Brazilian web culture is heavily driven by the consumption of

36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut 37 http://www.bbc.com/news/10122754 38 A social welfare program by the Brazilian government, part of the Fome Zero network of federal assistance programs. For more information, see: http://www.economist.com/node/16690887

30 content published or found through web portals, and the use of a variety of social media. Four of the 10 most visited websites in Brazil in September 2013 are primarily UGC (Facebook, YouTube, Mercado Livre, and Wikipedia); another four are web portals (UOL, Globo.com, Live.com, and Yahoo!). The remaining two are Google search domains (Google.com.br and Google.com).” The same study emphasises the role of media networks as a means for digital activism and political participation for Brazilians, showing a detailed summary of recent political manifestations using social media.

Figure 7: Taken from Mapping Digital Media Brazil (2013), this graphic shows the most accessed social networks by Brazilian users.

Brazilians use the internet for everything: entertainment, information, for political activism and commerce, as showed by Figure 8 and the top 10 most accessed websites by Brazilian users. Users go for social media and online content as refugees from a land dominated by traditional oligopolies of communication. Those oligopolies share the same neoliberal and conservative ideology of a country ruled by big corporations, are deeply involved in corruption scandals and were a main force in the recent coup d’etat of 2016, as supported by Teun van Dijk (2016).

Social media has been appropriated by the public administration, such as big cities' municipalities, as in Prefeitura de Curitiba39 (municipality of Curitiba), and also by social movements, such as Frente Brazil

39 For more information, see the Facebook page of Prefeitura de Curitiba: https://www.facebook.com/PrefsCuritiba/?fref=ts

Popular40 and Frente Povo Sem Medo41 . It was critical for the 2013 protests42, the 2014 World Cup protests followed by elections and nowadays in the protests for and against the what I critically, as do many Brazilians, consider as an illegal coup d’etat disguised as an impeachment process organized by most centre and right-wing politicians in the parliament and senate, supported by many social forces, to ensure the government with the vice president remaining in power43.

Therefore, the internet has a central role in Brazilian political activism. Many spontaneous protests are organized via social media and it is also a way for people to get informed about the protests taking place and when. Although participation in street protests has been massive, slacktivism (Morozov, 2011) in Brazil is also an alarming reality; as a result, some citizens are compelled to forget that it is even possible to organize themselves politically outside social media occupying the public space.

Yet, this appropriation of social media by citizens, politicians and public figures is not seen with critical eyes; for instance, the so-called echo chambers of algorithmic social media are hardly discussed by social media users. Social media nowadays imposes dozens of obstacles (Morozov, 2011) to political organization and this should be a constant object of debate.

Alexa Rank URL Category 1 Google.com.br Search 2 Youtube.com Online Video 3 Google.com Search 4 Facebook.com Social Network 5 Globo.com Web Portal 6 Uol.com.br Web Portal 7 Live.com Search 8 Mercadolivre.com.br Auctions 9 Yahoo.com Search 10 Blastingnews.com News Figure 8: The top 10 most accessed websites by Brazilian users according to Alexa Top 500, from August 2017.

Relying on social media for political activism and citizenship in democratic societies in the times of a so- called post-truth democracy44 is a big illusion, as supported by facts such as fake news, algorithms, echo

40 Coalition of social movements, gathered around supporters from the Worker’s Party and social movements related to its political allies: http://frentebrasilpopular.com.br/ 41 Coalition of social movements centred on Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (Homeless Workers’ Movement): http://www.povosemmedo.org/ 42 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/21/brazil-police-crowds-rio-protest 43 https://theintercept.com/2016/08/29/interview-dilma-rousseffs-impeachment-trial-nears-an-end-endangering- brazilian-democracy/ 44 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth

32 chambers. It is necessary to politicize the debate surrounding the adoption of social media as a tool to mediate the public sphere. There should be enough education about what is the World Wide Web45, what are social media groups, what is the Web 2.0 and how they are impacting cultural and political behaviours regarding citizenship and democracy, as its impacts are clear. After all, social media and internet groups are just new and stronger communicative capitalist corporations willing to profit some more from our information and sharing of data.

5) INDEPENDENT MEDIA

The case of Jornalistas Livres and Mídia Ninja

The report published by the Open Society Foundation, Mapping Digital Media Brazil, also stated in their executive summary: “At the same time, Brazilians witnessed the emergence of organized, on-the-spot, independent coverage of the protests, which were broadcast live from smartphone cameras over the internet, or recorded and then uploaded by individuals or alternative media collectives, edited and unedited. The internet and social media played an essential role in the organization of the protests, and also provided the means to disseminate live information of what was happening in the streets. Coverage by traditional outlets was comparatively lacking, both in substance and in speed of delivery.”

This independent coverage of protests marked in social media the presence of independent journalism. Among one of the biggest victims of police brutality according to the NGO Article 19 46 (2017), are journalists, rather than assassins. They are armed with smartphones, cameras, helmets and gas masks, the tools for surviving big street protests in Brazil. They are volunteers or professional journalists, part of the big intellectualised young precariat from Brazilian big metropolis, resembling what is mentioned by Standing (2014) about modern precariat. Their aim is only one, shifting the agenda of Brazilian journalism and its rusty traditional media oligopoly47. They are the front line of Brazilian protests and currently producers of the main trustworthy information about what really goes on the crowded streets of an exploding and self-destructive country in crisis.

45 https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/its-28th-birthday-how-democratic-web 46 Publication (in Portuguese): http://artigo19.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/24/files/2017/02/Nas-Ruas-Nas-Leis-Nos- Tribunais-viola%C3%A7%C3%B5es-ao-direito-de-protesto-no-Brasil-2015-2016-ARTIGO-191.pdf 47 The traditional interview program Roda Viva, from Brazilian public channel TV Cultura interviewed the founders of Mídia Ninja collective after the peak of the 2013 protests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmvgDn-lpNQ

It is possible to say that independent media refers to any kind of media such as radio, television, newspaper or internet-based groups that are free of influence from government or corporative interests. They can also be referred to as alternative media that distinguishes them from mainstream media groups, but not all independent media groups can be alternative media. Independent media groups can however be detached from interests of political groups or governmental institutions. They are not necessarily working together with the ideological interests of the status quo.

There is a certain kind of independent journalism called “citizen journalism”, that is connected to a participatory way of making journalism, where citizens not necessarily with formal journalistic training act as journalists. They act as journalists in the process of collecting data, making reports, analysing and sharing news or information. Citizen journalism has become more widespread after the emergence of the internet as a new means of communication. Wikis, blogs and smartphones allowed the popularization of this kind of journalism. The process of citizen journalism facilitates alternative and independent media groups, using collaboration, to increase the visibility of non-mainstream or counter-hegemonic information, being able to denounce oppression, repression, non-compliance to human rights, racism, and homophobia or police brutality. Other synonyms for citizen journalism can be: public, participatory, democratic, guerrilla and street journalism.

For Goode (2009), citizen journalism has direct effects on the public sphere and on democracy. Although it is a consequence of the emergence of the online world, citizen journalism is not only web-based journalism and neither only linked to alternative news sources. Citizen journalism can also include metajournalism, which Goode associates with the practices of tagging, sharing, liking and commenting: practices associated to the Web 2.0. According to Goode, ordinary user-citizens engage in journalistic practices while current-affairs blogging, posting videos, photos or eyewitness commentaries. Citizen journalists can both act as content creators as much as through metajournalistic practices. Citizen journalism does not have clear boundaries with regular journalistic practices.

While a collective of journalists can engage in alternative media publishing through citizen journalistic practices they can be inserted into mainstream social media pages, such as Google platforms, Facebook or Twitter, for example. Therefore, the boundaries between citizen journalism and traditional corporations is blurred. However, citizen journalism still imposes challenges to mainstream journalism and they usually feed from citizen journalism for their own interests. In a nutshell, citizen journalism corrupts the idea that news can be a product merely for consumerism, that can be bought from different

34 corporate media sources. Two main examples of this kind of citizen journalism in Brazil are Mídia Ninja and Jornalistas Livres, that will be further explained below.

A) Jornalistas Livres

(30/07/2017) Facebook Followers: 862.623 YouTube Subscribers: 18.588, 1.327 videos.

The Jornalistas Livres network (in English, Free Journalists), according to their website48, emerged on 12th March 2015 in São Paulo. It appeared as a response to the urgent need to oppose the hatred narrative, antidemocratic practices and permanent disrespect towards human and social rights, majorly supported by traditional Brazilian media groups. Some free journalists created this project in order to cover the 2015 protests, especially those by right-wing protesters supported and highly covered by traditional media groups, who asked, especially, for the impeachment of the, by that time, recently re-elected president Dilma Rousseff. Among one of the central personalities that created this collective is the journalist Laura Capriglione49.

Afterwards, this network, supported by many local citizen journalism collectives, created this big collaborative network that seeks to narrate Brazil as opposed to the traditional oligopolistic media. They created a crowdfunding initiative50 to support their work and after a short time were expanded especially in social media groups, on social media most accessed by Brazilian users, such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube (Figure 8). On their YouTube51 channel it is possible to follow their history since the beginning. They are daily posting videos and coverage about political events that occur nationally in Brazil, in all their pages, from their own website to specific social media profiles.

Jornalistas Livres also engage in broadcasting livestream coverages of big protests that occur in Brazil, as much as sharing content about them. Not only about politics, as this network also covers popular culture events such as the carnival and different cultural parades around the biggest Brazilian cities. Although they do not identify specifically with any particular Brazilian political party, both the journalists as much as their content directly involves personalities from the biggest left-wing coalition of Brazil, such as the Worker’s Party, Brazilian Communist Party and Party of Socialism and Freedom of Brazil. Their YouTube

48 https://jornalistaslivres.org/como-surgiu/ 49 https://jornalistaslivres.org/author/lauracapriglione/ 50https://www.catarse.me/jornalistaslivres?ref=ctrse_explore_pgsearch&project_id=13812&project_user_id=4272 15 51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmfVUvvsfs

35 page is constantly updated, containing dozens of interviews with key figures of Brazilian left-wing politics, indigenous and social movement representatives. In this sense, YouTube represents for them a platform where they can easily gather followers and spread their content as a television channel online. On YouTube, they have 18.588 subscribers (30/07/2017), with 3.045.714 visualizations so far. Jornalistas Livres serves as a way to fulfil the demand for pluralist journalism in Brazil, that opposes traditional media groups. However, after two years of exercising journalism online as a network, they still have a lot of obstacles to overcome when achieving democracy of media in Brazil. This is still a distant reality for Brazilian independent or citizen journalism.

Figure 9: One of the logos used by Jornalistas Livres

On 6th April of 2015, Jornalistas Livres released a manifesto52 proclaiming, among many things, the values of democracy and human rights. According to them, they are a network of collectives originating in diversity and they exist in opposition to the fake unity of thoughts proclaimed by the traditional media companies, centralized and centralizer. They attack the idea of journalism as a multinational industry. According to them, journalism as an industry, is naturally against the principles of democracy, despising the journalistic spirit in favour of badly disguised ideological and private interests, commercial and corporative. Therefore, they seek for a human journalism. Though citizen journalism covers with a more unbiased point of view, they understand that everybody has a bias, and therefore they proclaim for individual bias, recognising that there is no neutrality in journalism, as much as there is no no-party journalism. Their plurality is the result of the congregation of many different points of view, and “not from

52 https://medium.com/jornalistas-livres/n%C3%B3s-somos-s-jornalistaslivres-651d193d664

36 the internal rupture of our individual bodies and minds” (free translation – Manifesto Somos Jornalistas Livres).

In their manifesto, there is a specific part that mentions citizen journalism, saying they recognize that every citizen is a journalist when empowered by a social network, a blog, smartphone, film camera and his or her own ideas. They end their manifesto saying that they believe in journalism as a source for empowering knowledge, which allows them to overcome inequalities and to construct a less authoritarian world, less concentrated in the hands of a few military, economic and mediatic power. Thus, they do not tolerate media manipulation, empires, and dictatorships. They claim for people united, strong and sovereign – especially those from Latin America. Since 2015 they have been an important collective of citizen journalism acting on the everyday life of this agitated and complex Brazilian public sphere, covering without the bias from traditional media with the bias of citizen journalism and central left-wing personalities.

B) Media Ninja

(30/07/2017) Facebook Followers: 1.588.898 people YouTube Subscribers: 14.240, 233 videos.

Apart from being a mythical figure belonging to the history of feudal Japan, Ninja (Figure 11), in this case, is much more than a hidden journalist-spy among the crowds: it stands for Narrativas Indepenentes, Jornalismo e Ação (Independent Narratives, Journalism and Action). It is a left-wing decentralized media from Brazil, acting in more than 250 Brazilian cities. Media Ninja (Figure 10) is recognized for having a socio-political activist approach to journalism, in the sense of alternative-independent media as explained above. Media Ninja clearly imposes itself as an alternative for the traditional mainstream oligopoly of Brazilian media. This is a current discourse from their livestreams of protests, where they advocate for a network society, collaborative citizen-journalism and “twitaços” (mass tweets with specific hashtags). The group got international recognition after the protests of June, 2013.

Figure 10: From Fabio Malini, professor from the Federal University of Espírito Santo, posted on Facebook. Data extracted on 17/05/2017, from all the posts published on Facebook, from 33 media groups in Brazil. It shows the volume of interaction in likes given by people on the respective posts53.

The group’s origins go back to the protests against the rise of bus fares from 2011, that allied with a strike against the presence of the Military Police in the University of São Paulo, an international reflex from the Occupy movement and other European protests that reverberated in Brazil. At first, the current Media Ninja was called Pós-TV, a digital media linked to the cultural circuit called Fora do Eixo (Out of the Axis)54. The circuit of culture Fora do Eixo can be explained as a network of cultural production that grew out of a governmental initiative called Pontos de Cultura (Points of Culture). This group started to develop new technologies of communication and cultural production, besides acting as a social movement in collaboration with other similar groups or collectives. The journalist Bruno Torturra is considered one of the founders of Mídia Ninja, among other participants of Fora do Eixo, such as Rafael Vilela, Felipe Altenfelder, Dríade Aguiar, Pablo Capilé, Filipe Peçanha e Thiago Dezan.

53 Available only in Facebook (In Portuguese): https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155544410371151&set=a.477225711150.296154.703916150&typ e=3&theater 54 Linked to the promotion of independent artists and to nation-wide promotion of music festivals, led by Pablo Capilé.

Figure 11: One of the logos used by Mídia Ninja on their Facebook page

In 2011 the group covered the Marcha da Maconha (Marching for Marijuana) in São Paulo and later on in 2012 covered the situation of Guarani-Kaiowas indigenous people in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The network was officially launched in 2013, as a consequence of their coverage of International Forum of Free Press in Tunisia. Afterwards, they gained a lot of visibility with the protests of June 2013. They livestreamed the protests and worked directly with other networks of social movements, also influencing even the narrative of traditional media companies. They reached a high number of followers on social media of more than a million and a half on Facebook only.

In an interview given to Deutsche Welle Brazil in 2013, Bruno Torturra states that “I think that the (traditional) media did not know how to read fast what was going on there on the networks and streets, and we were always present in the protests, broadcasting everything live, photographing and giving the point of view of the activists. There was a big demand for an independent coverage, we were there”. The same article poses the question whether the outreach of Mídia Ninja has been overestimated when compared to traditional media. Moreover, an interview in the same article with Professor Sylvia Moretzsohn, author of Repórter no Volante from UFF, Rio de Janeiro, says that Media Ninja is an important way to cover the reality, especially to denounce certain ways of violence that are usually not in the spectrum of coverage from traditional media news. Thereupon, there is a huge difference between independent media coverage and traditional media coverage, as the former adopts street journalism while the latter is a hostage of official sources and press offices.

The British newspaper The Guardian affirms in an article55 that with the increase of criticism towards Rede Globo and other sources from traditional media groups, Mídia Ninja has become rapidly one trustworthy

55 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/29/brazil-ninja-reporters-stories-streets

39 source of information for many those who are involved in protests and that broadcasted protests for the whole country and even to people abroad.

Also on Deutsche Welle (2013), Bruno Torturra points out that among the objectives of Mídia Ninja is to broadcast information to broader shares of the population. According to him, they want to democratise the production of information and, with that, make the people better informed in order to have a more solid democracy, fair, integrated and close to facts. Moreover, journalism itself should be rethought, as the technological and economic contexts have changed in the 21st century; there should be more focus on the quality of publications, their critical approach and not only on selling big amounts of information for a certain prize, centred on industrial methods. Mídia Ninja’s main criticism is the lack of democracy of means of communication in Brazil.

C) Key Events - General Strike of 29th April 2017

Figure 12: On 28th April 2017 around 75 thousand Brazilians marched in protest against the non-legitimate government of Michel Temer and its attempts of reformation of labour laws, social security and austerity measures agenda.

This specific key event will serve as a telling case that represents a series of key events that were observed on the constant online observation of independent media groups and their usage of social media during 2016-2017. In 28th April 2017, Brazil experienced one of the biggest general strikes of its history56,57. Nearly 40 million workers crossed their arms against the so-called “reforms” proposed by the illegitimate government of Michel Temer, especially those that seek to dismantle decades of consolidated social rights, such as the labour laws and social security, important rights belonging to the constitution of 1988,

56 For coverage in English: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/world/americas/brazil-general-strike.html 57 Coverage from Jornalistas Livres: https://jornalistaslivres.org/tag/greve-geral-de-28-de-abril/ (In Portuguese).

40 traditionally linked to the creation of a welfare state in Brazil that restored its democracy and its Rechsstaat. This general strike is a direct consequence of the alliance of the major trade unions confederations of Brazil, as much as social movements, including the two biggest fronts Povo Brasil sem Medo and Frente Brasil Popular. This general strike was supported by the catholic church58, as well as by many different branches of evangelical churches.

Moreover, this general strike impacted many different sectors of Brazil, especially public transportation, banks, factories, schools, universities, public services and magazines. According to the leader of MTST (Homeless Workers Movement), Guilherme Boulos, the last strike that could be compared to the general strike from 04/28, 2017 was in 198659.

According to an editorial from Jornalistas Livres60, traditional media, as usual, first ignored the convocation of a general strike in the evening news of the night before, 27th April, referring to Rede Globo and its Jornal Nacional, but was forced to cover it the next day, based on the success of the strike. As usual, traditional media groups did their usual manipulation of facts. Also, Temer’s government made efforts to condemn the manifestations and to reduce their importance. The military police kept with its usual business of repression, and in the end of the day there were some members of social movements arrested as well as some victims of violence that had to be hospitalized.

Mídia Ninja and Jornalistas Livres dedicated the entire day to cover the strike and in loco protests in the whole country, among other collectives, independent media groups and the traditional media. There were live streaming broadcasts made online on Facebook only, and from time to time the broadcasts were being interrupted and new links had to be generated. The coverage provided by Mídia Ninja was more stable; the Ninja reporter responsible for broadcasting protests was doing usual interviews with respected politicians and activists all around, proclaiming the “importance of networks” to fight the big oligopoly of traditional media and how users had to like, give comments and share the video on Facebook for their entire network. From time to time the reporter was also convoking users to write specific hashtags on

58 Catholic News websites covering the Bishop Dom Leonardo opinions over the general strike, from CNBB (National Conference of Brazilian Bishops): http://br.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/04/26/a_posi%C3%A7%C3%A3o_da_cnbb_sobre_a_greve_geral_/1308166 and https://noticias.cancaonova.com/brasil/dom-leonardo-fala-da-posicao-da-cnbb-sobre-greve-geral-de-28-de- abril. Official website from CNBB: http://cnbb.net.br/?s=greve+geral 59 https://www.cartacapital.com.br/politica/depois-da-greve-geral 60 https://jornalistaslivres.org/2017/04/greve-geral-nada-sera-como-antes/

Twitter and to engage in the famous Brazilian “twitaços”, a massive tweet postage using the same hashtag, with the main objective to become trending topics.

The speeches provided by the journalist from Mídia Ninja centred around the ideology of one word, the network (Redes), as a powerful tool to provide independent information, that is alike those provided by the traditional media groups. By networks, in fact, he meant Facebook and Twitter accounts. All the transmissions were made by Facebook. Due to the way Facebook is organized, the timelines from 28 April of specific group pages are not easily reachable and the links used on the observation are quite lost in the oversaturated and disorganized Facebook timeline. It was possible to collect more precisely videos from YouTube and Facebook pages by clicking on the video sections of pages. Some of them added on footnotes below.

Another constant presence in the discourse by the Ninja reporter is the support to the independent media groups and their work. He also constantly repeated criticisms of traditional media. Therefore, advocacy for democracy of the means of communication in Brazil is connected to the discourse provided by the media reporter. The users are exposed to the importance of regulation and alerted about the oligopoly of media groups in Brazil. Besides, in his report, he counts the number of people watching the livestream and after having problems with the link he encourages the subscribers to share the new link in order to reach the same peak of subscribers as before. What can be observed is the importance of social media for them, with special attention to Facebook, the fourth most accessed website in Brazil, besides the natural importance of a smartphone in broadcasting and receiving information.

There were dozens different livestreams watched, including one promoted by the weekly left-wing magazine called Carta Capital61. Mídia Ninja broadcast on Facebook62 the march from Largo da Batata to Michel Temer’s house, but there were more than one link available for 28th April, as they were constantly having problems with connexions and having to renew their link. Protests in Cinelandia, Rio de Janeiro, were also covered by Jornalistas Livres, on 28th April, and on their streamings it is possible to see resistance after repression caused by the military police who fired bombs into the direction of the politicians speaking to the crowd. In coverage from the same day it is possible to see the action of the military police

61 https://www.facebook.com/CartaCapital/videos/1462044303816979/ 62 https://www.facebook.com/MidiaNINJA/videos/876832472474899/?hc_ref=ARRYgQcEPt4yrIXMFzprIi 6u4ZUfvkjn5nnNT-tQqIlQHpKgIP3n-0qghJU5A25iQcY

42 and arbitrary detention of citizens63. Another coverage provided by Jornalistas Livres shows the presence of Military Police in central São Paulo after repression of demonstrations that occurred in the morning riots of 28th April 64. Mídia Ninja thus made different livestream coverages about protests in Brazil, on different locations.

There were also a few soundtracks, where leaders from social movements, different collectives or political parties’ personalities were giving speeches and aiding the organization of activists during the march. The protests had the massive presence of the MTST organized by Frente Povo sem Medo, who were shouting slogans. There was also the presence of MST and speeches made by indigenous collectives. All the different trade unions (CUT, CTB, Intersindical, Conlutas, Força Sindical, among others), MST and left-wing political parties, such as the Worker’s Party, Brazilian Communist Party and Party of Socialism and Freedom of Brazil, among other smaller ones, were also present. However, it was the participation of independent activists and student unions that was massive. The student movement represented an important part of the crowd in the protests65. Women and LGTB collectives are also important groups that are present inside the protests.

By the end of the protests, after the mass approached the house of Michel Temer, in a high-class neighbourhood of São Paulo, the military police started to repress the movement with their usual means of tear gas bombs, moral effect bombs and rubber bullets. The coverage made by an independent journalist collective called Ponte66, showed closely this repression from the front lines, as well as the reaction from Black Blocks67, who were depredating bank agencies and even a restaurant that is called Senzala68 (reference to the houses where enslaved Africans were kept when)69.

The ideology of networks (Redes) advocated by those independent media reporters is no different from the cyber utopia from the Web 2.0. In fact, in order to achieve real democracy for means of

63 https://www.facebook.com/jornalistaslivres/videos/521429137980968/ 64 https://www.facebook.com/jornalistaslivres/videos/521074571349758/

65 Discourse provided by a student from occupied schools in Paraná, Ana Júlia, by Mídia Ninja: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUTsXWG7uJA 66 https://ponte.org/ 67 A tactic developed by European activists in the 80s, called autonomist movements. Usually protesters who are covered in black, often associated with anarchism. 68 Report from Folha de São Paulo (In Portuguese): http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2017/04/1879716- black-blocs-depredam-restaurante-em-sao-paulo.shtml 69 https://www.facebook.com/pontejornalismo/videos/913970668753013, https://www.facebook.com/pontejornalismo/videos/913973302086083

43 communication, it is necessary accountable and truly democratic media platforms. Social media networks, as argued above, are neither democratic nor accountable, they represent private financial interests aligned with the same neoliberal ideology that those groups fight against. They lead to totalitarian practices rather than empowering. Modern public policies that aim to regulate media possession should take into account new media platforms. Just heavy Facebook users will have access to most of the content created by those independent media groups and activists if it is keep being posted on Facebook. They do not take into consideration that every post is Facebook’s own possession, not a truly accessible and democratic information, if considered that it is a closed platform. Ideally, activist groups for a more democratic and accountable media should avoid Facebook, social media networks and the digital activism culture associated with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Moreover, both Jornalistas Livres as much as Mídia Ninja lack proper websites having the same content shared on their Facebook and YouTube pages, so Brazilian activists have been pushed to Facebook and seem attached to this logic. In general, social media networks, when adopted, they are more restricting than emancipatory. Adopting social media networks is no solution for the old problem regarding the absence of means of communication and public policies. The problem is rather with politics and power in society. Moreover, the ideal scenario would be the one that independent and alternative media would have access to financing their own traditional media, such as newspapers, as much as access to radio and television concessions for plurality of information.

6) DISCUSSION AND OBSERVATION

“Even before the popular catharsis of June, but especially after that, I have been asking myself if we lived a certain bug of Facebook. I noticed in the dynamics of social media a process more pathologic than therapeutic. I felt on my skin that the continuous and frenetic hyperflow of posts was becoming antithetical to reflection and to the capacity of informing. Everything in that network was in one way or the other credible and equivalent. The tool of communication that one day seemed to me so favourable to the transformation of collective consciousness had become one depressive grotto of crystalized ideas, short reasonings and temporary controversies. Facebook has given the status of debate to mere quarrelling or lynching. If it was thankfully from Facebook that I became a public voice, now, insofar as I became more and more object of public debate, no longer a reporter, the same Facebook started to disgust me”. Bruno Torturra, Olho da Rua, December 2013. Revista Piauí (Free Translation)

In a nutshell, it is possible to say that the context of lack of pluralism of opinions in Brazilian journalism, or the concentration of public audio-visual media in the hands of a few families, generate the lack of democracy in means of communication nationwide. In addition, the lack of proper public policies directed

44 to communication, which traditionally have been working under industrialist terms, causes the emergence of an independent media or self-claimed alternative media groups. All of them have been organizing themselves around collectives and social movements for decades, sharing a lot of inspiration from experiences developed on World Social Forums70.

The democratic movements that were born in in Brazil by the late 70s and 80s, sharing ideologies coming from democratic socialism and the theology of liberation created a setting during the democratic period that is now more alive than ever. The construction of what was the World Social Forums, which had its first edition in Porto Alegre, Brazil, impacted the emergence of such journalistic collectives. The spirit of alter-mundialization aims to deconstruct the hegemonic neoliberal ideology, while ironically, the latter is currently present in its own digitalized terms, on social networks platforms.

In Brazil, there is a high and increasing demand for new media groups willingly to cover socio-cultural and political activities that happen in the public sphere through the eyes of the citizen. This is a form of citizen journalism, as covered by Goode (2009). This concept re-enforces the logics provided by social network platforms, the life presented in social media profiles. With civic culture or citizenship exercised online, or the so-called slacktivism, instead of occupying public spaces, individuals are using profiles and egoistic behaviour to express their personal identities, through their political points of view in the public sphere. In addition, those social networks are not accountable in the sense of being composed by algorithms that guide the behaviour of users, sharing advertising and selling their personal information (Morozov, 2011). Besides, there is a phenomenon of “talking to yourself”, reinforced by echo chambers, where algorithms steer the user to share information with people who are more likely to interact with them. Therefore, social media end up being a tool for subcultures that aim to share information to each other and be entertained at the same time. Moreover, it also feeds the young precariat who seek to establish their own channels of information and a way to develop their own work in a world of crisis and lack of opportunities.

All of this, backed by an international scenario of political activism in the 21st century that reached its apsis with the Arab Spring and with the Occupy Movements, is called by Braga (2012) as the plebeian pulse. In Brazil, what the movements call “redes” (networks) empowered them to spread their own points of view in a setting that lacked all the opportunities for them to share their views. This was helped by

70 World Social Forum can inspire activists to unite against the global power grab, by The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/mar/23/world-social-forum-tunis-activists-united- against-global-power-grab

45 accumulation of expertise developed by progressive collectives of artists, activist journalists and social movements such as MST, MPL or MTST. At first organized in blogs, those activists started to use social media networks to help them perform their offline activism and even spread the news about protests or eventual repression caused by the military police or other human rights violations. The situation remained the same until the protests of 2013, when there was a big polarity of opinions among those occupying the streets.

The protests of June 2013 were not only marked by the plebeian pulse and neither were only organized by progressive left-wing groups. A remarkable case that illustrates this is the celebratory 71 march organized by the MPL in June 2013, which ended with the groups of right-wing and extreme-right wing to expel progressive forces and political parties by means of violence. The end of the protest was marked by nationalists carrying the Brazilian flag and burning the Worker’s Party flag, while singing the national anthem in front of the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo. Their slogan was, “Sem partido (no parties allowed)”, coincidentally or not the same ideology of fascism.

As represented by the theory of precariat (Standing, 2009), the precariat is composed by the so-called atavists, or those who are easily attracted by populist, nationalist and hatred movements, as much as by the progressive precariat that seeks for more social emancipation. Both of them deny the current globalized world, with the old-fashioned representative democracy, controlled by a hegemonic neoliberal ideology, linked to the accumulation of capital by financial-technological capitalism. What all the poles share is their use of the internet, especially social media networks. Their tool of sharing information is the web and smartphones.

This multipolar political reality of 2013 was split in two in Brazil after the 2014 World Cup and 2014 elections. From 2015 onwards the public sphere was bipolar. What both sides of the pole also shared was a lack of criticism towards the means of communication they were using, or the social media networks. Those tools are generally accepted as the standard status quo. Both groups remained on the street, but with different aims: one pro Dilma Roussef and defending democracy against a parliamentary coup d’état, and the other in favour of it, inflamed by traditional media and financial interests. Both were using different symbols, like two football teams fighting against each other on a match.

71 After the bus and metro taxes were cut down back to earlier levels by governor Geraldo Alckmin and mayor Fernando Haddad after the June protests of 2013.

On one side the yellow CBF t-shirts72, selfies with the military police, national flags, covered, supported and broadcasted by Rede Globo among other traditional media vehicles. There were right-wing politicians, those called “saudosistas” (nostalgics) from the military dictatorship, or even old military themselves claiming for their memory, and youth right-wing movements, such as MBL73, and soundtracks against communism or Dilma Rousseff. On the other side, there were those supporting Dilma’s election, old democratic forces, independent activists, anarchists, left-wing parties and social movements, now organized in two different fronts that cooperated with Frente Brasil Popular and Frente Povo sem Medo, as explained above.

After the parliamentary coup, Michel Temer, former vice-president, was established as president of the Republic, who steered Brazilian politics to neo-liberalism, recession policies and to conservatism. The progressive forces started to increase the protests against Temer and all the consequences of his non- legitimate presidency (formed by white only males)74, using the slogans “For a Temer” (Temer Out) and “Diretas Já” (Direct Elections Now). In 2017 right-wing groups left the streets, or at least stopped gathering masses. The current context is of general dissent and deep crisis. Communication, at least for the young people, mainly unemployed and on precariat conditions, are centred on social media, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Political activism and civic culture are marked by digital activism. In the media ecology, it is also possible to find the traditional media, marked by local newspapers and the hegemony of television, centred on Rede Globo, independent journalistic collectives, as much as fake news websites75.

As for the independent and alternative media groups, as already argued and showed above, their practice of citizen journalism is associated with corporate social media networks. The data and production generated by their journalism is inside private platforms that administrated large amounts of journalistic content produced by citizen journalists. There is no widespread discussion and criticism towards the use of big social networks for progressive political forces, they are widely appropriated, as is well illustrated by the paragraph written by journalist Bruno Torturra (founder of Mídia Ninja) on his article at Piauí magazine quoted at the beginning of this chapter. This lack of criticism towards Facebook-hegemony creates a dilemma, where on the one hand Facebook represents a free new technology that has media

72 Brazilian Confederation of Football, the famous yellow t-shirts used by Brazilian national football team. 73 Coverage from Jornalistas Livres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPc7WgA8CyI 74 For more information read: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/13/brazil-dilma-rousseff- impeachment-michel-temer-cabinet 75 Report from Folha de São Paulo: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrissima/2017/02/1859808-como-funciona- a-engrenagem-das-noticias-falsas-no-brasil.shtml

47 potentialities for independent media groups while on the other hand generates negative externalities to information posted and generated in its platform, such as its non-accountability, as the tool is controlled by algorithms that shape the behaviour of users. Those features are structural, as social media networks have owners, investors and managers behind them, and they are corporations and should be analysed as such76. Thus, it is important to understand the analysis developed by Evgeny Morozov (2013) about slacktivism and digital activism, as well as understanding the ideology behind social media networks, social behaviour on them, and their political economy.

7) ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND CORPORATIVE CAPITALISM IN SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS

According to the researcher of digital activism, Evgeny Morozov (2011;2013), there is enough evidence to conclude that there is a huge problem with digital activism and the use of social media networks with the intention to achieve social emancipation. Morozov (2011:179) mentions about a Danish experiment conducted by Anders Colding-Jorgensen that shares similarities with the heated topic of fake news and post-truth democracy in the current international political scenario.

Jorgensen created a fake case where the Danish Storke Fountain would supposedly be demolished and, based on that, created a Facebook group invoking people to fight against this demolition. The result is that after some time his group was filled with virtual activists eager to fight against this fake injustice, and this case was widely shared and broadcasted. In the end, Jorgensen admitted the experiment, which helps us reflect critically about the effects of Facebook and its use for social activism.

For Morozov, the success of online political activism is hard to predict. Policymakers, therefore, should be careful with online-based activism. For him, Facebook-based mobilization will occasionally lead to genuine social and political change, but this is mostly accidental and has no direct connection with Facebook per se, but with external structural situations. Facebook, as a platform, was created for the purpose of entertainment, besides its financial and corporative interests to build a free platform that operates big data in exchange for profits in the current financial technological capitalist market.

Moreover, as argued by Morozov, it is ridiculously easy to create Facebook groups for all the different political interests that can shift from global to local, while most of them have low or no efficacy, as he shows with Help the Children in Africa, or other online campaigns against big international catastrophes,

76 Morozov’s speech for Nexus Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYHiE1GX1HI

48 such as genocides or human rights. NGOs and international organizations have been advocating for human rights for decades and there was no need for social media platforms to facilitate this process.

Hence, Morozov argues that there is a form of cyber utopianism that has been spread ideologically and with the direct help of corporative and state institutions world-wide. For him, as much as for José van Dijck (2013), the phenomenon of Web 2.0 represented by the Silicon Valley is directly connected to the neoliberal ideology. Companies that use technology and invest in new private technologies for free, without need for taxes, own all our information and data; they also serve as a way to employ current precariat workers in a time of crisis. As an example, Morozov mentions Uber or Airbnb.

Morozov uses arguments developed by another Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, on the development of the first public spheres, at the time of coffehouses and newspapers. The high amount of information available prevents social cohesion, leading to a feast of endless and disinterested reflection about many different subjects, and to the triumph of infinite but shallow intellectual curiosity. For Morozov, Kierkegaard shows that, already at the time of the first public spheres people were getting interested in everything but nothing at the same time, which is what happens with a Facebook timeline. People are so overwhelmed with personal opinions about everything, that they would indefinitely postpone any important decision. Therefore, this situation creates a lack of commitment caused by a multiplicity of possibilities.

As a social psychological approach, Morozov argues for Facebook as being mainly focused on entertainment and creation of identity, whereas activism would assume a position of showing off to friends, a fake activism that does not say much about real activism in the public sphere, occupying public spaces77. For him, Facebook is more connected to self-promotion, narcissism and overconfidence. On a social media platform, everybody can frame him- or herself in the way they want, being perfect and followed by many people. However, does it really represent action, effective debate or dissent that would lead to real social emancipation? The answer is no, and those social media platforms would hardly lead to true feelings of empathy either, apart from all the visibility on social media networks (Brighenti, 2007).

The question about Facebook or online activism in general should be quantity versus quality: it is easy to mobilize masses online, to have many shares, likes or followers (interactions, in general); however, does it really represent quality social organization that would lead to any social emancipation? Facebook serves

77 See, The privatisation of cities' public spaces is escalating. It is time to take a stand, Bradley L Garrett, in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/04/pops-privately-owned-public- space-cities-direct-action

49 as an online identity market, where people feel useful and important while having preciously little political impact. Therefore, digital activism makes activism something easy for everybody, making political participation something that can be replaced by the use of social networks. For Morozov, there is something called group fetishism and the madness of the crowds doesn’t necessarily translate into the wisdom of the crowds. All of this, helped by algorithms and echo-chambers make the situation even a bigger illusion for users and social movements that use social media networks for activism. Everything looks like spam or is lost among hundreds of links that turn out to be impossible to be read.

8) CONCLUSION

This thesis sought to explain the current context of media ecology around the world, but specifically in Brazil, as well as its impact on the current transnational public sphere. Moreover, it aimed to show how it is necessary to analyse the structural political economic variables behind new media, which has a role in the financial-technological capitalism, that then also impacts the precarious proletariat of the 21st century. Moreover, it aimed to show the connection between inequality, neoliberalism and new social media platforms. Social media networks impact directly on the behaviour of users and are associated with an ideology related to neoliberalism, informacionism and big data.

Methodologically this thesis used critical theory analysis, aided by online ethnography and social scientific research on the effects of social media networks, recognized as the new media phenomena from the 21st century. This cannot be analysed without studying political economy and social classes. Thus, the notion of the precariat was discussed in the current context of social classes, as much as studies of capital in the 21st century provided by Thomas Piketty, which show the curves of rising inequality and wealth accumulation in the hands of a few.

Brazil was used as a case study that shows how the massification of social network users is used by political subcultures to organize themselves in the public sphere. In a context of political and economic crisis, independent media groups emerge, who serve as an alternative to the traditional corporate media, which in Brazil has a singular context of oligopoly that continues a democratic deficit from its authoritarian past. It is possible to conclude that in societies with a lack of democracy in means of communication, as in the Brazilian case, social network platforms are appropriated to facilitate the emergence of the so-called citizen journalism, such as Jornalistas Livres and Mídia Ninja. Independent and alternative media groups use corporate social media networks to benefit from them, which are presumed as more democratic than the traditional media. In a reality without proper public policies that democratise means of

50 communication, citizens take refuge in online new media spaces. However, those new media platforms, at the same time, follow a contradictory ideology from those same independent and alternative media groups that exercise citizen journalism. In general, it is possible to argue that only proper public policies will help to achieve more accountable and democratic means of communication, not private corporations that serve their own ideology of how technology can serve humankind. There should be proper regulatory mechanisms for access to media, audio-visual and content production. In the same way, activists should discuss critically social media and its political economic impacts.

Moreover, a lack of trustworthy information coming from the traditional media help the emergence of independent media groups. There is a social demand for plurality of opinion in media. Social media networks are appropriated by independent media as a way to reach their users, on a free platform, that offers interactive Web 2.0 resources to exercise citizen journalism. Those groups, often, question the hegemonic ideology supported by traditional media and are supported by social-political movements that take part in political disputes in the public sphere.

Therefore, with the absence of proper freedom of press and public policies for democratic and accountable means of communication in society, the civil society itself naively creates a certain type of citizen journalism that occupies the virtual space offered by corporative social media groups, such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. Much more than organizing oneself politically in the public sphere, those platforms are used by subcultures to create identities, creating visibility and recognition.

However, social media networks, apart from empowering independent media groups, should be seen critically, as argued by Morozov. They hardly can serve as tools for social emancipation, but as tools that lead to authoritarian practices. Currently, this means that surveillance and data are controlled by corporations that own research pages, video broadcasting and social media networks, as all the information shared inside them belong to them and can be sold thereafter.

This thesis also observed that there is a lack of criticism towards social media networks and their ideology by progressive political groups and independent media, as showed by the case study. This lack of criticism can be associated to the ideology of cyber utopianism. Political activism associates social media with tools that facilitate communication and that potentially can help reach social emancipation. Nonetheless, those tools are developed for entertainment and to connect people that cannot share the same space at the same time, mainly. Social media networks were not necessarily invented for political usage, but they are

51 appropriated by user-citizens this way. They can create new possibilities as much as dozens of new challenges, such as fake news, trolling, bots or the phenomenon currently called post-truth democracy.

Social media networks, as presented by Morozov, should be dealt with critically. There is a price that is paid when someone uses them, as no social media group works as philanthropy and they should be regarded as corporations with a certain ideological power, such as the neoliberal Web 2.0. Therefore, there is a meaning behind the link button, the way Facebook or other networks induce their users to act in a certain way, sharing, liking, posting about their own life. Apart from several daily benefits in facilitating life, social media networks have their dark sides, as much as the whole internet, and should be not taken for granted. While we localize ourselves on Google Maps or mark “Attending” on a Facebook event our data is being used and sold.

APPENDIX

Appendix 1: A bike transporter worker takes a picture from the manifestation in central São Paulo in the morning of April 28th, on the general strike day. Source: Folha de São Paulo78.

Appendix 2: Demonstration at Avenida Paulista, São Paulo. Source: Folhapress, September 2016.

78 http://fotografia.folha.uol.com.br/galerias/50279-greve-geral-no-brasil-28-de-abril#foto-683157

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, M. (2007). The Critical Dictionary and the wiki world. English Today, 23(2), 9-18.

Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (2015). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton university press.

Annette N. Markham & Nancy K. Baym (Eds.)(2009). Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 11, No. 3).

Benjamin, W. (1940). Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Boas, F. (1901). The mind of primitive man. Science, 281-289.

Bonilla Y. & Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson. Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States.

Braga, R. (2012). A política do precariado, do populismo à hegemonia lulista. Boitempo Editorial.

Brighenti, A. (2007). Visibility: A category for the social sciences. Current sociology, 55(3), 323-342.

Castells, M. (2010). End of Millennium: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture| (Vol. 3). John Wiley & Sons.

Creswell, J. W. (2013). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications.

Critical Art Ensemble. (1996). Electronic civil disobedience and other unpopular ideas. Autonomedia. da Silveira, S. A. (2010). Ciberativismo, cultura hacker e o individualismo colaborativo. Revista Usp, (86), 28-39.

Dean, Jodi (2003). Why the Net is not a Public Sphere. Constellation 10 (1), 95-112.

Dijck van, José (2013). The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dijk van, T. A. (2016). How Globo media manipulated the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Discourse & Communication, 11(2), 199-229.

Du, C. (2016). The Birth of Social Class Online: The Chinese Precariat on the Internet.

Faoro, R. (1958). Os donos do poder-formação do patronato político brasileiro. Globo Livros.

Fragoso, Suely Dadalti (2006). WTF, a crazy Brazilian invasion. In F. Sudweeks & H. Hrachovec (eds.) Proceedings of CATaC 2006. Murdoch, Australia: Murdoch University Press.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.

Fraser, N. (2014). Transnationalizing the public sphere. John Wiley & Sons.

Garton Ash, T. (2016). Free Speech, Ten Principles for a connected World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European journal of cultural studies, 10(2), 147-166.

Goode, L. (2009). Social news, citizen journalism and democracy. New media & society, 11(8), 1287- 1305.

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.

Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the internet: Embedded, embodied and everyday. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hobsbawm, E. J. (1975). The Age of Revolutions (London 1962). The Age of Capital.

Horkheimer, M. (1968). Critical Theory, Selected Essays. Continuum – New York, 2002

Horkheimer, M. (1993). The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Task for an Institute for Social Research (1931). Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Writings. König, R. (2013). Wikipedia: Between lay participation and elite knowledge representation. Information, Communication & Society, 16(2), 160-177.

Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: EP Dutton & Co. MANAGEMENT REPORT, 2224.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2015). A ideologia alemã: crítica da mais recente filosofia alemã em seus representantes Feuerbach, B. Bauer e Stirner, e do socialismo alemão em seus diferentes profetas. Boitempo Editorial.

Miller, V. (2016). The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture. Ethics, Privacy and Speech in Mediated Social Life. London: Sage.

Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: How not to liberate the world. Penguin UK.

Morozov, E. (2014). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. PublicAffairs.

O’reilly, T. (2005). What is web 2.0.

Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The Virtual Sphere, The Internet as a Public Sphere. New Media & Society, 4, 9- 27.

Piketty, T. (2012). Capital in the 21st Century.

Singer, A. (2012). Os sentidos do lulismo. Reforma gradual e pacto conservador. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Spilioti, T. (2016). Digital discourses. A critical perspective. The routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication. London: Routledge.

Standing, G (2012). "The precariat: from denizens to citizens?." Polity 44, no. 4: 588-608.

Standing, G. (2014). The Precariat. Jargon. Key Concepts in Social Research. Context.org

Standing, G. (2016). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and racial studies, 30(6), 1024-1054.