The
Institute for the Future had me over last week for an exciting day of pondering the future of media, content production and internet usage in Brazil. The experience was one to be remembered: the day consisted essentially of having two super-sharp "futurologists" pick my brain about what distinguishes Brazilians from the rest of the world in their digital habits.
With little prep time, I jotted down a couple dozen thoughts the night before and the morning of, and stuffed my hard disk and computer bag with everything that I could think of that might prove useful for the day. Probably the most interesting things that I had to share with them were the notions of cordiality and the "horror às distâncias" (literally "horror at the distances", probably best translated as the horror of distance) as central characteristics of the syncretically constituted Brazilian psyche, as described by
Sergio Buarque de Holanda in the foundational text
Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil—no complete translation available), and also a great clip on Brazilian technobrega music from the brilliant film,
Good Copy Bad Copy.
The concepts of Sergio Buarque, however, are probably the ones most worth my elaborating on. In his 1930s attempt at outlining the defining elements of what makes Brazilians Brazilian, he drew a portrait of the Brazilian as an intractably social character, cordial to a tee and afraid of even the smallest emotional distances that might arise between themselves and others. To the American, European or Asian traveler in Brazil (I've spoken with all three), even today, the Brazilians are a strikingly social people, always bubbling forth with questions and with never an awkward conversational moment, save for linguistic barriers. Always curious, always friendly, almost never shy—these attributes tend to come out in any discussion of Brazilians held amongst foreigners at least vaguely familiar with the country.
On the other hand, in talking with Brazilians who have lived or are living abroad, one inevitably encounters complaints or even dire psychic crises amongst Brazilians who find their host societies (I can speak safely of at least the US, UK, France, Germany & Japan) to be difficult places to find the types of fluid social interactions that they expected at home. Cold, stuffy, stilted, socially awkward, introverted, and formal are often the complaints heard of these northerly lands from those Brazilians who have ventured far from home at length. One Brazilian friend living in London for 2+ years wrote in his
blog about what a pain it was that Londoners expected you to schedule social events so far in advance that despite his reasonably sized social network, he didn't have any friends that he could just call up spontaneously for dinner, a drink or a movie.
Reviving Sergio Buarque's ideas for the 21st century in such a context could help to explain why while the primitive social network site
Orkut floundered in the US in 2004-2006, it was
exploding in Brazil. Hungry for "social utilities" (a facebookism), Brazilians didn't care that Orkut didn't even come in Portuguese, and in fact, they probably liked the idea that they were getting in on yet another techno-cultural trend imported from the frigid north (despite their complaints while living abroad, Hollywood movies and American TV almost never go unwatched in Brazil today). Building on their famously syncretic tendencies—melding African, European and indigenous South American cultural and religious traditions to form their own distinctive cultures—young Brazilians reappropriated Orkut in what could be seen as one of the most massive acts of technosyncretism to date.
To understand what I mean by technosyncretism, it helps to look a little deeper at the story behind Orkut itself. In a dinner in São Paulo with a Google employee who had been sent to Brazil as part of a mission to revamp the site and actually attempt to turn it into a revenue-generator for Google, I learned some interesting tidbits. As this employee put it, the site really needed a lot of work to really provide what its target audience wanted. Developed originally by
Orkut Büyükkökten, a gay Turkish engineer at Google working on the project in his spare time, and then pushed forward by a team of primarily married Indian engineers and designers, it was obvious that a site whose primary users were young, heterosexual Brazilians would need some serious help. As Google strived to make the site generate revenue and accomodate the needs of its core users, they became active participants in the overwhelming force of Brazilian sociability to mold, transform or engulf foreign ideas and cultural practices to fit their own needs and desires, and the process of technosyncretic
antropofagia took hold. This form of specifically Brazilian cultural cannibalism was first described in a literary manifesto by poet
Oswald de Andrade in 1928 and continues both overtly in artistic and literary works as well as in more subtle and diffuse ways across various cultural arenas.
While many foreigners in Brazil may quickly and easily understand Sergio Buarque's emphasis on cordiality (Orkut's blog asks us, "
Are Latin Americans the world's friendliest people?"), the dark side of this friendliness almost certainly goes unnoticed by most casual visitors to the country. The fear or horror of distances of which he writes, however, is probably the more interesting and more telling aspect of the Brazilian psyche. If Brazilians already feared distance in the 1930s, drawing their social relations closer in order to continuously suss out the possibility of any danger lurking around a corner, one can only assume that such a fear in 2008, if indeed it is a continued phenomenon, ought be much more intense, with crime, violence, and economic insecurity continuing and in many cases worsening across the country.
This inchoate notion that I propose here—of the hypersocial Brazilian internaut and syncretic social technology user—is probably worth developing further, especially if I'm ever expected to deliver any additional insights into the future of Brazilian internet usage, media creation and technology adoption. Next empirical steps would be a comparative analysis of SMS usage, Brazilian Orkut user activity/intensity compared with Orkut users of other nationalities as well as Facebook/MySpace usage, and even more basic data such as email, message boards, etc.
On a theoretical level, it would be particularly interesting to look deeper into not only Sergio Buarque's
Homem Corial and
Raízes do Brasil, but also books like Maria Silvia de Carvalho Franco's
Homens Livres na Ordem Escravocrata (1974), where she develops the notion of the class of the social aggregates—those Brazilians living under the regime of slavery but being neither slaves nor landholders—and the way in which their existences revolved around the constant notion of "the favor," always attempting to stay on the good side of the landholders who allowed them to farm their land, but could kick them off at a moment's notice. This precariousness is seen by many present-day Brazilian social scientists as having continuity with 21st century Brazil, where millions of urban residents live in informal slums or
favelas. Many, if not most, of these Brazilians depend on unstable jobs in the service sector that could disappear at the whim of employers with whom they have surprisingly personalistic relationships, reminiscent of early 20th century social relations in the US and Europe (see Lewis Coser's
infamous paper on the anachronism of modern servants).
I would argue that these types of social conditions of extreme inequality and their relationship to the aforementioned hypersociality—a social phenomenon that frequently walks a fine line between friendliness and clinginess, curiosity and paranoia—are the most interesting areas to be explored. While some might accuse me of badmouthing my gracious hosts of nearly three years, I would hazard a guess that the common portrayals of the Brazilian as friendly to a fault (often verging on characterizations of a facile and naïve race of tropical noble savages) stand a greater chance of offending than my own efforts to dig deeper into the psychology of the people who have left me wondering why the hell I can't just call up my friends to go out for dinner and dancing at 10pm on a Thursday anymore.
An indigenous leader examines a newspaper photo of a human banner that he and more than 1,000 other native Amazonians created the day before with the help of US-based NGO, Amazon Watch.
South American Presidents Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Fernando Lugo share the stage with leaders of popular social movements including Via Campesina and the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement in an unprecedented gathering at the Forum.
