Abstract
During Brazil’s largest protests in years, small news collectives and activists took to the streets to report. Whether it’s community radio or blogs covering topics the mainstream media ignore, the country’s poorest communities are making their voices heard,
From the suburbs of São Paulo to the poorest favelas in Rio de Janeiro, ordinary people are transforming Brazil’s media landscape. As with the Arab Spring, Spain’s protest group, Indignados, the Occupy movement and Istanbul’s Taksim Square protests, the internet and social media played a central role in Brazil’s June 2013 protests. Demonstrators used Facebook and YouTube to organise and broadcast. Initially the protests were against the rise in public transport fares. Next came a large agenda of complaints, from the costs of the 2014 FIFA World Cup to corruption among politicians and lack of investment in public education and healthcare. Hundreds of thousands of people took part; on 20 June alone, more than a million people in dozens of towns across the country came out on the streets.
According to a survey by Brazil’s most prominent research institute, Ibope, 91 per cent of the protesters heard about the movement via the internet, with 77 per cent using Facebook. Some analysts viewed the protests as a result of Brazil’s growth in GDP and recent improvement in some social indicators. With more of the population in education, there may well be more critics voicing opinions about politicians.
These protests – and the way they were reported and organised – did not happen in isolation. They emerged from a burgeoning new Brazil, where increasing numbers of people can make their voices heard. Recent improvements in the country have made this possible, particularly under the presidency of Dilma Da Silva-Rousseff. The previous president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, managed to get high rates of inflation under control and stabilised the currency when he was finance minister in 1993, making Brazil a more fertile place for not only economic growth but free expression and social change. The group Midia Ninja was launched on 13 June, when protests first kicked off in São Paulo. “We decided to go to the streets to cover it,” says journalist Bruno Torturra, one of the founders of the collective. Their aim was to cover protests around the country. Midia Ninja built their newsroom at the beginning of July; a website hosting videos of protests (http://www.postv.org/) followed. “We could see that the traditional model of journalism is in crisis,” Torturra says. They used Facebook to publicise their coverage – and it worked. They posted one request for voluntary support on social media and they received more than 1,500 offers of help from more than 100 Brazilian cities.
The traditional media depict poor neighbourhoods as the dark side of the city, as everything rich people do not want to be
ABOVE: Summer 2013 saw some of the largest protests in years, primarily organised online
Credit: Keiny Andrade/EPA
The Committee for the Democratization of Computing (CDI) is one of the fruits of this new Brazil, born after 20 years of dictatorship, and after ten years trying to find its own path, and voice. When the organisation founded its first centre in Rio’s Dona Marta favela in 1995, the aim was to bring computer access to everyone. At the time most people on low incomes hadn’t seen a keyboard, a computer mouse, let alone had internet access in their homes. Today, CDI’s expertise has reached more than 1.5 million.
CDI’s chief executive, Marcel Fukayama, says that the goals of the organisation have continued to follow the changing needs and will of the people. “We believe that the protests across the country were 100 per cent connected with our vision,” he says.
These days, it seems, people want more than consumerism. They want a say in their country. Computers – and specifically the internet and social media sites – are effective tools for making this possible.
CDI’s Fukayama explains that its actual main objective is to “transform lives and develop communities. Transformation is our responsibility, not government’s or business,” he says. They employ five steps to help small communities use technology to improve their lives. According to Fukayama, CDI must be invited by a community representative to set up a centre. First CDI staff survey the neighbourhood in order to understand its environment. They identify problems and possible solutions. They then create an action plan, execute it and evaluate the whole process. This strategy seems to be successful: CDI is active in 13 countries and 780 communities around the world, from England to Ecuador. In 2012, there were 92,084 direct beneficiaries.
In response to critics, some of whom argue that CDI is simply about making money and that the positive social outcomes are just a by-product, Fukayama says, “Some people’s visions are stuck in the past. They think that to deal with traditional companies is awkward, they say that you cannot have profit, you cannot focus on the outcome.” He adds that the old, outdated model of the NGO had to change, particularly following the recent economic crisis in Western countries, after which companies reorganised their budgets around social responsibility. “We don’t teach youngsters how to push a button, we try to explain how this button can change a life and a community.”
According to Abong, the Brazilian association of NGOs, there are almost 291,000 different non-profit private foundations in the country. One of the best-known organisations focusing on social issues is the Observatório de Favelas (Favelas Observatory). In 2012, it published a report looking at alternative media in poor communities in Rio, revealing that 104 different media initiatives operated in these areas. The report also aimed to understand how inhabitants of these areas see and represent themselves.
Eight corporations control about 80 per cent of all of the traditional media in Brazil. They mainly depict poor neighbourhoods as the dark side of the city, as everything rich people do not want to be. Observatório’s report argued that these big corporations still have massive control of how favelas are represented – but they are no longer the only ones reporting on these communities. Journalists from the traditional media were also targeted in some of the recent protests in São Paulo and Rio. In one incident, rioters set fire to one van from a TV channel. In Rio, reporters were expelled from rallies. It seems people want to hear their voices reported in a different way.
People from favelas write blogs, produce newspapers, magazines and websites, as well as radio and television programmes. Rocinha.org, based in the biggest slum in Latin America, has almost 900,000 visits per month, with numbers increasing all the time. According to the site, at the time of its launch in 2006 most online news about the favela was linked to violence or drug dealing. “It was necessary to confront it, and give the other side of the story”, the website states. As a result, the NGO, the website and a strong commitment to the community it focused on was born.
For Mídia Ninja, it’s about going to the streets and working rather than staying in an office, planning what to do. According to Torturro, the group still doesn’t know how to survive financially, but they refuse to worry about it at the moment. Their reporting has been celebrated. For their involvement in the action, sometimes very energetic, they have been accused of being biased. “We are trying to change the journalism standard image from the cold neutrality to a passionate objectivity,” he says.
New voices have also been amplified through the organisation Oi Kabum, a joint project between Cecip, a NGO linked to alternative media in Brazil, and Oi, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in the country. The organisation has help set up schools that specialise in technology in four regions: Rio, Belo Horizonte (in the rich southeast region), Salvador and Recife (in the not-so-well-developed northeast region).
We don’t teach youngsters how to push a button, we try to explain how this button can change a life and a community
One of their teachers, Lorenzo Aldé, agrees that the internet is not a problem for those who live in Brazil’s biggest cities. He teaches 90 students from 16 to 21 from poor neighbourhoods. All of them have some way of connecting to the internet and have access to a digital camera. According to Aldé, the message to students is: “You do whatever you want to do here.”
Under the Oi Kabum scheme, teenagers attend classes focusing on video, photography, graphic design or computer graphics from 8am to midday for 18 months. The school enrols one group of students per session, in order to give ample attention and focus to every single student. “They use their identities, their values, their cultural references, even their troubles’ as subject matter for their work,” says Aldé.
The programme started in 2009, and its first students graduated in 2011. Already, they have success stories to tell. Former students are now working with renowned producers or famous bands and passing on their knowledge to children from other poor communities.
What Mídia Ninja, Oi Kabum, CDI and other groups are doing is more or less what most of the protesters have been trying to do on Brazilian streets. They are sending a message: Brazilian people don’t want just a computer anymore. They want their citizenship back, in all that entails. And they will scream until their voices are heard.