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In 2004, the same year Facebook launched at Harvard, Google launched a social network called Orkut that changed internet history — at least in Brazil.
John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was one of the first of the web’s elite digerati to receive an invitation. Barlow was working at the time with Brazil’s Minister of Culture, musician Gilberto Gil, to expand the range of Brazilian music available to remix and share online, and he decided to give all 100 of his invites to Brazilian friends. Two years later, 11 million Brazilians were on Orkut — out of only 14 million internet users in the whole country. (By comparison, the U.S. had more than 10 times as many Americans online by then, but only 14% of them were using social networks.)
“There were blogs and portals back then,” says Bia Granja, co-founder of YouPix, a website and festival dedicated to celebrating Brazilian web culture. “But when Orkut came, it pulled everyone in. There were people from rural parts of Brazil who didn’t have an official government ID card but had an Orkut profile. We needed this form of expression; it was the door of entry to the internet for 82% of Brazil’s population.”
Orkut in 2004.
Ten years later, with their country more visible internationally than ever thanks to successful but polarizing World Cup and Olympics bids, Brazilians are arguably the most hyper-social people on the internet. They spend twice as much time using social media as the global average, and more time online than watching TV. Last year, they doubled the time they spent on Facebook, while global usage declined by 2%.
Brazil is the fourth-largest mobile phone market in the world, with 1.4 cell phones for every citizen, and Brazilians spend more time on social media than email, web browsers, or video sharing. Half of Brazil’s internet population is under 30, and almost all of them use social media. Brazil is now the second-largest market for Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr other than the U.S. It took Facebook seven years to take the No. 1 spot from Orkut, which is still the social network of choice for 6 million Brazilians, or 1 in 20 Brazilians online. Last year, the Wall Street Journal declared Brazil the "Social Media Capital of the Universe."
Brazil was culturally primed for such an online impact because, very generally speaking, Brazilians are an extraordinarily warm and friendly people. They are family-focused and social and like to do things en masse. Millions of Brazilians come to the beaches on New Year's to offer white flowers to the sea goddess Iemanja; millions gather outside to celebrate Carnaval each year; and recently millions have taken to the streets protesting billions of dollars of taxpayer money that have funded World Cup and Olympic infrastructure projects while millions still live in extreme poverty.
“Brazil has always been the social model of the future,” says Barlow. “Everything refers to something else that you wouldn't know anything about if your aunt hadn't told your mother something a couple of years ago about something her lover heard. Brazil is an enormous inside joke, and the internet is a mass conversation. Brazil was the internet before the internet existed.”
So then, what’s the cumulative effect of these billions of online social interactions in real life?
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Mauricio Cid was one of the most popular Brazilians on Orkut until he got kicked off the site in 2008. Cid was publishing mostly humor content to more than a thousand Orkut fan communities reaching 5 million Brazilians — 20% of Brazil’s internet population at the time, making him one of Brazil’s first bloggers, albeit completely inside Orkut’s walls.
By 2008, Orkut had become one of the 10 largest websites on the planet, but Google wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening among Orkut’s mostly Brazilian users at the time. Then Google tried to run ads on Orkut (aside user-generated content) and reports quickly surfaced of those ads being displayed next to pictures of naked children and abused animals. The government filed contempt charges against Google Brazil’s executives for refusing to turn over user data to the police. Globo, the largest media company in Latin America with a near-monopoly on TV, radio, and print mediums — but not online — decided to run a TV news report going inside alleged criminal activities on Orkut, and included Cid’s Michael Jackson fan page on the list of suspicious communities.
Mauricio Cid
Flickr: Lourenço Fabrino / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: luringa
“Most of the groups on the list were neo-Nazis and things like that,” Cid told me on a Skype call from São Paulo. “It made no sense. There was nothing criminal about my Michael Jackson community, but I was banned. So I decided to create a humor blog called Não Salvo [“Not Saved”] in 2008 so I could publish whatever I wanted, including a little ass and titties, without anyone censoring me.”
Cid was living in Santos, a beachside city two hours outside of São Paulo at the time, working odd jobs at the morgue and fixing printers. “The morgue was horrible,” Cid says. "I would have taken pictures, but that was before cell phone cameras.” Then he got a job in São Paulo and started spending his four-hour bus commute publishing content to Não Salvo from his phone. Today Cid is one of Brazil’s biggest web celebrities. “It’s a testament to how much we love to share, even with backward technology.”
Não Salvo’s site still looks like it was designed in the AOL era, with a Jesus marquee and a flaming computer mouse floating over clouds of digital detritus, despite drawing 27 million visitors a month. Visitors don’t just read on the site, they interact with it, and participate in the content creation. So better to call them participants — or fieis (“the faithful”), in Não Salvo lingo.
On a forum called Desafio Aceito (“Challenge Accepted”), the fieis mobilize by the thousands and sometimes millions for challenges like crowdsourcing a porn screenplay and plotting practical jokes on gringos. In 2010 during the South Africa World Cup, they decided one of Globo’s broadcasters, Galvão, was annoying, so they launched a campaign called #CalaBocaGalvao — which translates to “Shut up, Galvão” in Portuguese.
A poster for the 'Cala Boca Galvão' hoax.
“We created a video with a narrator in English and everything, telling gringos that 'Cala Boca Galvão' meant to preserve an endangered species of birds in the Amazon,” Cid explains. The video showed how demand for feathers for Carnaval costumes was fueling a black market of bird trafficking and wiping out the endangered species, and urged viewers to save a bird’s life with a tweet. #CalaBocaGavao became a global top trending topic for 14 days and made it into the New York Times .
Não Salvo is also not afraid to get into darker subject matter, but mostly with a humorous, prankster edge, posting the crappiest banners the fieis have spotted at protests that have engulfed Brazil since last June, alternating images of fans with tacky face paint and protest paraphernalia. Another Não Salvo thread called Peço Perdão Pelo Vacilo (“forgive me my trespasses”) gathers videos Brazilian police put on YouTube brutally humiliating everyday citizens by forcing them to read statements asking for forgiveness for minor crimes like taking a selfie on top of a police vehicle.
If the internet refracts our own culture back to us, I asked Cid what he sees in the reflection of 27 million humor fans on Não Salvo. "The web is opening a space not just to show we have a voice online, but to show that we can unite, take down the government, express our opinions, and come together.”
Photograph by Julie Ruvolo
Freedom of expression is a relatively new phenomenon for the current generation of Brazilians. Brazil was run by military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985; speech was repressed and regime opponents prosecuted and tortured. Brazil’s current president, Dilma Rousseff, was tortured herself by the military in 1970 for working with guerrilla groups opposing the dictatorship. Since Brazil returned to democratic rule in 1988, poverty has been halved, and combination of economic growth and socialist policies has lifted 28 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty and another 36 million into the middle class. But Brazil still ranks among the most unequal countries on the planet, and the richest 1% of the population takes in more household income than the poorest 50%.
This inequality affects Brazil's internet culture. Internet access is now ubiquitous among the richest Brazilians, but only 1 in 3 households in the new middle class have access, and it drops to 6% among Brazil’s poorest citizens. In the face of such tenacious inequality, young Brazilians are watching their government pour $25 billion in taxpayer money to fund stadiums and infrastructure projects for this summer’s World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. They are the most connected generation and are also the only generation currently alive that hasn’t experienced the repression of living under the dictatorship.
“When the dictatorship ended in 1985, we won the right to speak, but we didn’t win the right to be heard,” says Leonardo Eloi, a project director at Meu Rio (“My Rio”), a social mobilization platform that helps Brazilian youth in Rio de Janeiro organize around local issues they care about. “There’s a big difference between the two. So we’re creating a culture now for the government to hear its citizens.”
Meu Rio co-founders Miguel Lago and Alessandra Orofino
Renato Stocklet / NA LATA
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