WTF A Crazy Brazilian Invasion

1 FRAGOSO, Suely, WTF a Crazy Brazilian Invasion.
In: ESS, Charles ; SUDWEEKS, Fay ; HRACHOVEC, Herbert (orgs) ; CATaC 2006 - Fifth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, 2006, Tartu. Estonia. School of Information Technology - Murdoch University, 2006. v. 1. p. 255-274.
WTF A CRAZY BRAZILIAN INVASION

SUELY FRAGOSO Universidade do Vale do Rio do Sinos, Unisios So Leopoldo, RS, Brazil
Abstract: This work attempts to provide some insight into the Brazilian Invasion of Orkut, a Social Networking System. This is an Internet phenomenon which started in 2004 and in 2006 still shows no signs of letting up. To this end. the paper examines some data concerning Internet use in Brazil and then proceeds on to a brief description of the Social Networking Software Orkut. To address the Brazilian Invasion, the paper uses, above all, the records of Orkut itself, which bear witness to a high level of hostility between users from Brazil and from the United States of America. The aggressiveness of the posts, contrary to the image of friendliness and pacifism of that Brazilians have, lead to some of the most violent battles in the clash of cultures set up in Orkut. In an attempt to understand the Brazilian protagonism in on-line aggression, some hypotheses are formulated which indicate that there are issues relating to modern day national identities, in general, and, in particular, the formulation of the Brazilian national identity.
1. Introduction The initial uptake of the Internet in Brazil was rather late, as the Internet has only been legally available for public use since 1995. Ten years later, the number of Brazilians with access to the Internet is still relatively low 1 and they are highly concentrated in the richer urban parts of the country2 The intensity of the
The number of domestic users active in Brazil in December 2005 was estimated by Nielsen/Netratings to be 12.2 million (Ibope/Netratings, 2005), which corresponds to about 6.6% of the approximately 185 million Brazilians that IBGE estimated to exist at the end of the year. This figure doubles when access through terminals located at work, place of study or that are open to general public use. (Saito and Valim, 2005). 2 According to a study by GAID-FGV, in 2003 the two richest regions of Brazil, South and Southeast, had respectively, 13.5% and 10.41% of homes equipped with computers with access to the Internet, compared with 3.68% in the poorer North region (GAID1
2 FRAGOSO, Suely, WTF a Crazy Brazilian Invasion. In: ESS, Charles ; SUDWEEKS, Fay ; HRACHOVEC, Herbert (orgs) ; CATaC 2006 - Fifth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, 2006, Tartu. Estonia. School of Information Technology - Murdoch University, 2006. v. 1. p. 255-274.
appropriation of the Internet by Brazilian users, on the contrary, has been exceptionally high: in June of 2005 Brazilian users stayed on-line for longer than the users in any other nation included in the study by Nielsen/Netratings, exceeding the averages for the Japanese and the US users by more than one and two hours respectively3. A good part of the on-line time of Brazilians is taken up using applications for one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many computer mediated communication (Leite, 2005, s.p., Ibope/Netratings, 2006a) Instant messengers (MSN Messenger e ICQ), blogs and fotologs, the sites of cellular telephone operators (used to send torpedoes without having to pay the charges for doing so from a cell phone) and chat rooms are particularly popular in Brazil (Magalhes, 2005, s.p.), indicating that Brazilians are much more interested in the potential of the Internet as a relationship tool than as a means of distributing content. The lengthy on-line times and the concentration of users on a few types of sites (particularly synchronous communications systems, blogs, photologs and ,more recently, social networking services - SNSs) favored the occurrence of the Brazilian Internet Phenomena, a specific category of Internet memes4 in which, for no apparent reason for this happening, the number of Brazilian users of an online service greatly surpasses the number of members of the original nationality of the service. The first record of such an event dates back to June 2003, when the number of Fotolog (http://www.fotolog.net) Brazilians users surpassed the U.S. contingent by a few members5. At that time, a cultural clash concerning the correct mode of appropriation of Fotolog was already well under way. The majority of U.S. Fotolog users were reported as high-minded amateur photographers, who publish serious photography, whilst most Brazilian floggers were said to be teenage girls posting saucy webcam portraits of themselves, their friends, their pets and the like (Kahney, 2003, s.p.). The battle reached its apogee when Fotolog started charging its members
FGV, 2003, p. 43). 3 The average connection time for home Internet uses in June 2005 in Brazil was reported to be 16h54min, compared to 15h35min in Japan and 14h46min in the USA. The other countries included in the survey were Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. (Ibope/Netratings, 2006) 4 Internet phenomena or Internet memes are events in which the popularity of something relatively obscure increases geometrically or exponentially, often suddenly, supported by the propagation of content through the Internet. It has been noticed that Internet memes tend to have a short life spam. 5 In 2004, the number of Brazilians was estimated at around 50% of all Fotolog users (Alerigi, 2004, s.p.)
for many posting privileges which resulted in the site being flooded with images entitled fotolog free or the like, most of which were posted by Brazilian users. Social networking software are particularly prone a this type of event and, in fact, one of the largest and probably one of the best known of the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon events has been the recent Brazilian invasion of Googles social networking service Orkut, which started in the services early days and still shows no signs of letting up. The Brazilian Invasion of Orkut Orkut (http://www.orkut.com) is an SNS that was launched in January 2004 by Google. As with its more famous predecessor Friendster, and most other social networking applications, Orkut is based upon Milgrams small-world model (1967, as described in Barabasi, 2002) and works by collecting and recording connections between users to form a large interconnected database. Orkut is an invitation-only system: in order to join Orkut one has to be invited by someone who is already a member of the service. Having received an invitation by e-mail to join Orkut, to join one must register with Google (this requirement has recently been added) and build ones profile. Orkut profiles are organized on three layers: social profile (composed of features such as relationship status, age, gender, nationality, languages spoken), professional profile (education, occupation, job description and the like) and personal profile (eye color, hair color, looks, best feature etc). All of the information requested is optional, which means to say that a user could set up and maintain a profile giving absolutely minimum information; practically just the name under which they registered. A picture can also be associated to the profile. Once the profile is declared completed, the user gains access to his or hers Orkut page. At the top right corner of the personal Orkut page, a windows shows the picture of the friend who has sent the original invitation, whose name is a link anchor to that persons profile. In the his/her friends window at the top right corner of ones Orkut page (Figure 1), thumbnails and links to the profiles of friends are available clicking on them leads to the profiles of those people, and so on. On the page of any Orkut user, the system displays the chain of friends which connect the viewer to that specific person. When a user encounters the profile of someone they know, selecting the option to add as a friend triggers an internal invitation which this known Orkut user will find the next time they log in and accept or not (or
ignore if they so wish). Any Orkut profile can be read at any time by any other user6. Each user has also an album, capable of holding up to 12 pictures, and a scrapbook, where other Orkut users can leave messages. Both the album and the scrapbook are fully visible to all users. In contrast to other SNSs, such as Friendster for example, Orkut does not provide information about recent visitors to a profile. The possibility of snooping around other peoples profiles, albums and scrapbooks unnoticed is certainly an major attraction of Orkut. Perhaps, however, the most fascinating aspect is that which is a basic characteristic of social networking software, which is almost making concrete the links between people. This means that with a few minutes of hopping from friends to friends of friends one is faced with a representation that makes obvious Milgrams notion of six degrees of separation (Barabasi, 2002). The network of people that thus becomes visible is nearly always exquisitely diverse and highly interesting.
Figure 1: Someones Orkut profile.
Adding to the voyeuristic entertainment value of reading strangers' profiles without being spotted, another advantage of Orkut is the possibility of creating
Some restrictions can be applied to the public visibility of some specific subsets of information of a profile.
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thematic communities. This facilitates the identification of users with common interests, regardless of the degree of separation between them or between their geographic locations, which whilst it is typical of computer mediated communications does not cease to be one of its principal benefits. This feature adds the potencial for knowledge building and knowledge sharing activities to Orkuts capability as a business networking and dating service. One supposed advantage of SNSs that work by invitation only is the presumed reliability of all the members of the service. This factor, combined with the woefully restrictive concept of personal on-line identity that appears to guide Orkuts design, explains the deterrent to the creation and maintenance of unrealistic profiles. Orkut users can flag someone elses profile if they suspect it is false (that is, if the user identifies themselves with a name or image that is not consistent with their off-line identity) or if the user is suspected of having violated the Terms of Service Agreement. Despite having been considered quite strict by some of the services early users (Hempell, 2004), Orkuts managers were always much more easy going with users who create fictional profiles than had been the case with Friendster7. Other interesting features of Orkut include the News page, which gives access to two different sections: announcements (the news strictly said, basically information about changes in the system, updates of the regulations and features and so forth) and demographics, a set of bar graphs with the daily statistics of Orkut users (Figure 2). The existence of demographics has proved to be an important attraction of Orkut: following the changes in the user statistics over time has become a passtime for many users of the service. In March of 2004 a community dedicated exclusively to recording and discussing Orkut Statistics8 was created, which, in January of 2006 was still active and had 1.463 members, who were responsible for more than 150 subject threads, totaling thousands of posts.
Johnatan Adams, creator of Friendster, was particularly strongly opposed to the socalled Fakesters. He launched a crusade against them, trying to bring order back to the system by deleting profiles named as legendary or historical characters, profiles who did not portray realistic pictures, profiles named as or using inappropriate words or images to describe themselves or those linked to absurd numbers of other users. A crisis was thus created, as amongst the Fakesters were some of the most enthusiastic, if also the most anarchic, users of Friendster (Anderson, 2003, s.p.). 8 http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=34264
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Figure 2: Orkuts demographics page on 30 of January 2006. To the left, from top to bottom, the graphs classify the users by the following categories: age (18-25, 26-30, 31-35, 36-40, 41-50, 50+), here for (friends, activity partners, business networking, dating) and relationship status (no answer, single, married, committed, open marriage, open relationship). The larger graph, to the right, shows the users by percentage by country, Brazil, United States (the link beneath this, which reads details, leads to another graph which classifies the number of users by US State), Iran, Pakistan, India, Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, Portugal, Estonia.
In its two years of existence, Orkut has grown to have millions of users at an incredibly fast pace (Figure 3). As the number of Orkut users shot up the membership profile started to shift from the an initial US majority to internationalization. In the middle of February 2004 more than 60% of the users of Orkut were from the United States, After these came the users from the United Kingdom and Canada, each with a little more than 3%. Other countries which at first appeared to have strong user bases were the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. In mid-April, the US share was reduced to less than half of the total number of users, while Japan and Brazil had grown to 7,4% and 7,2% respectively (Hempell, 2004, s.p.). In May, USA users were 43% of the total and the proportion of Brazilian users (15,02%) had nearly tripled the percentage
of the Japanese, which had decreased to 5,66%. Close to the end of the month of June the percentage of Brazilian users overtook those from the United States. From then onwards, the percentages of Brazilian and American Orkut users has evolved as an inverse proportion to one another.
Figure 3: Graphical representation of the total percentages of Orkut users by nationality over the period from May 2004 to Jan 20069. At the top, data about the 13 nationalities which have figured amongst the top 10 in that period of time: United States, Brazil, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Spain, Iran, Pakistan and Portugal. At the bottom, without users from Brazil and the USA. At the start of May 2004 members of the Community Orkut Statistics started to record regularly the percentage of users reported in Orkuts demographics bar graph. Data available from this community has shown itself to be reliable over a period of several months of observation. Orkut Statisticss Topic Next change in nations top 10? (607 posts by 02/05/2006, started at 4/21/2004) was the main source for Figure 4.
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As the number of Brazilian users increased so too did the number of communities with names and subject topics in Portuguese: the first of which appears to have been Eu ando com meus ps10, created soon after the service started (January 23, 2004, having 9,702 members but only 30 topics in February of 2006). One week later, January 30, 2004, another user created what appears to be the oldest community that defines itself as Brazilian and which is also one of the most active in Orkut with 549,842 members and more than 10,000 topics in February 2006. Entitled simply Brasil11, as of February 2006 the community description was a forum for Brazilians and anyone else with an interest in the country and its culture and the community is defined as being in Portuguese. However it is known that the definition of a language for communities was only included in Orkut in June of 200412, probably as a response to the protests of users from the United States about the rapid proliferation of communities in Portuguese. While it could be relatively easy to solve the discomfort caused by non-English-speaking communities (the option to search for communities solely in one language appears to be a sufficient solution), it was practically impossible to prevent Brazilians from entering communities that were totally in English and, without ceremony, start sending messages and creating topics in Portuguese. The first communities dedicated to discussing the high number of Brazilian users were created in the first few months of Orkut being available. It was not long before some communities acquired a tone of protest against Brazilian Orkuteers, which did not go unnoticed by the Brazilians, who then set about creating anti-USA communities. Table 1 lists some examples of such communities that were created during 2004 and that were still active in February 2006.
Table 1. Examples of Communities created during 2004 to discuss the high number of Brazilians in Orkut and which are still in activity in 2006.
Name United States of Brazil WTF A Crazy Brazilian Invasion Creatio n 04/25/04 05/07/04 Owner Huy Zing Gera Dikarev Language English English N Members 4,317 2,696
I go on foot, http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=240. http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=4249. 12 Initially there was an option for multilingual communities, which was removed in January 2006.
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Too Many Brazilians in Orkut WTF a Crazy American Implosion? USA Sucks Brazilians, the Plague Eu Odeio os Estados Unidos Why do you hate Brazilians? Brasil Sucks! Brasil Amazon is only Brazilian! Ok? Eu odeio quem odeia o Brasil No Americans, Yes Brazilians! Americans & Brazilians Brasileiros: Vergonha do Orkut
05/16/04 06/15/04 06/20/04 06/18/04 07/16/04 07/18/04 07/17/04 08/01/04 08/07/04 08/30/04 09/11/04 11/18/04 12/23/04
John. Huy Zing Giuliano Griffante Marcio Wilheim Victor Brasil Jags R. J0nkatz /. Troll July Fernandes Babi Barbara Bruna Peres Justino Diego Romo Elias Chamoun Eric Saraiva
English English Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese English English English Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese English Portuguese
1,211 120 65 507 8,174 292 20 2,422 3,114 6,407 80 161 118
In the same mold as had happened in the first months of Orkut, when the Brazilians set about trying to outnumber the US users, the second half of 2004 saw a significant push in search of an even more ambitious objective: that of obtaining such an overwhelming majority of Brazilians that Orkut would be taken from the Americans. Created in March of 2005 and having 3,959 members in January of 2006, the community Brazilians Own Orkut13 calls for the Brazilian users to Click on Invite Friends and invite all of your friends to enter here!14 so as to bring into the community the greatest possible number of Brazilians. In this the community intends to be a way to show all the world how big Brazilians are and prove that we Own Orkut! because We are patriots and hate everyone who says we are a plague! Let us show our power! (Pedro Braz!, February, 2006). Other similar communities were created throughout 2005, for example O Brasil dominou o Orkut15 e O Brasil lidera o Orkut16.
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=1643152. The text available in January 2006 is in Portuguese and reads: Misso: Clicar em Convidar Amigos e convidar todos da sua lista de amigos a entrar aqui! 15 Brazil controls Orkut http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=5632216, criada em 8 October, 2005. 16 Brazil leads Orkut http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=6901646, criada em 7 December 7, 2005.
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From the first signs of proximity between the percentages of Brazilian and US users the Brazilian media has colaborated in boosting Orkut as the latest trend amongst Brazilian internet users (for example Folha de So Paulo, Eu quero ter um milho de amigos, Caderno Teen, 24/05/2004; Veja, Gincana da popularidade, 16/06/2004 and Fantstico, Um milho de Amigos, 01/08/2004) . Despite there having been records of the sale of invites for Orkut through online auction sites (Bad, 2004, s.p.), the generosity with which the Brazilians provided invitations to other people for Orkut increased as the competition with the US users grew and this was certainly an essential factor in the green-andyellow invasion. It was not and it is still not uncommon to see requests for and offers of Orkut invites in Portuguese spread across newsgroups, mailing lists, blogs etc. (Figure 4). In addition it became common to encounter Brazilian user profiles with hundreds of friends in fact, some users have thousands of friends. As each Orkut profile does not support more than one thousand (and an apparently random few) connections, it is not unusual to find Brazilian profiles with names followed by I, II, III etc. This is a workaround strategy to bypass this restriction so as to be able to obtain at maximum levels the social prestige implied by characterizing oneself amongst the most important connectors in Orkuts network17.
Accumulating as many connections as possible is far from the most efficient way to become a central connector, but it is certainly a very good way of appearing to be so or to be thought of as such.
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11 FRAGOSO, Suely, WTF a Crazy Brazilian Invasion. In: ESS, Charles ; SUDWEEKS, Fay ; HRACHOVEC, Herbert (orgs) ; CATaC 2006 - Fifth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, 2006, Tartu. Estonia. School of Information Technology - Murdoch University, 2006. v. 1. p. 255-274. Figura 4: Examples18 of offers for Orkut invites taken from Brazilian sites in 2006. At the top, (a), Z Orkut announces that time of having to beg for an invite to Orkut has come to an end, just ask Z Orkut (zeorkut@yahoo.com.br) and your wish will come true. Underneath, another post on the same blog comments: Z Orkut is a flop, but I am not and Be my friend and lets explode this closed circle!!!!! Lets break down Orkuts door. At the middle, (b) shows a topic named Quem quiser entra no Orkut (Whoever wishes to enters Orkut) from an online forum, with offers and at the bottom, (c) shows the access to a form for an automated Orkut invite sender from a site named Im in Orkut.
The ease with which Brazilians send Orkut invitations and the fact that they accept even unknown people as their friends has to be, without doubt, another factor that irritates more circumspect users. After all, part of Orkuts original charm was due to its club priv character and the making explicit of the six degrees of distance between users , which has now been ruined by a flood of Brazilians who thought it amusing to invite in almost anyone and to link to everyone else in the service, collecting hundreds of orkut friends. So what? The fact that an on-line service that was originally based in a specific country has been taken over by users from a different nationality is not a shocking event, given that anything that is published online can be accessed by people physically located anywhere where there is an Internet connection. Certainly the appeal of any web-based service will vary in different regions around the globe according to the cultural specifics of the potential users.. Because they favor the desire to accumulate connections (as a demonstration of social prestige), SNSs are particularly prone to be taken over by users from some types of pre-existing groups. So much so that independently of and parallel to the Brazilian invasion of Orkut, several other similar services which were expected to grow in the United States before expanding overseas have also been flooded with members from other nationalities. It is known that LinkedIn, for example, grew further and faster in Iceland, Finland, Israel and the Netherlands than in the US, while Friendster was first taken over by members from the Philippines (Glasner, 2005, s.p.). The fact that Orkut was severely abused by a profusion of fake profiles, spamming messages and unauthorized uses of the service, including illegal
All examples were found via a Google search carried out on 9th February, 2006 (the search terms were <convite orkut>, search was limited to pages from Brazil and returned 186.000 results within 0,06 sec).
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activities, is nothing new either: the same is known to have happened before in several other computer mediated communication services, giving rise to some of the most widely known legends of the internet culture. It is difficult to find an experienced internet user who has never heard of the rape in LambdaMOO (Dibbel, 1993, s.p.), of the male user who presented himself as an old, lonely and crippled woman and under this character conned several other users (Stone, 1991, p. 82-83 apud Bechar-Israeli, 1995, s.p.) or of the email asking for help to avoid the fortune of an African belated husband, client or friend from being confiscated or frozen by some unfriendly African dictatorial government. What is really interesting about the invasion of Orkut has been hinted at by the typical responses given to a question that has been asked repeatedly in different places and circumstances: why Brazilians? The overwhelming majority of attempts to answer this question invoked the Brazilian stereotype. An item called Top ten reasons orkut is popular in Brazil, published by Orkut News in February 2005, summarizes some of the causes most commonly given for the massive presence of Brazilians in Orkut: we [Brazilians] know lots of people because we go out more often [than people from other countries]; we are really a fun and different people and we love to . . . bring some warmth and "real stuff" to this virtual community Finally, we're a nice and friendly people and we're not afraid, like most other orkut users, to interact and exchange experiences with everybody else, no matter what country (Silva, 2005, s.p.). In another item available at the same site, the reputed beauty of Brazilians has also been included, as Orkut Media editor G. Tachibana considered that photobooks should be a popular feature amongst Brazilian users because they are more likely to be attractive or beautiful perhaps someone can write in why Brazilians look so good. Is it the sun, the beaches, exercise? (Tachibana, 2005, s.p.) Scholars also tended to resort to such stereotypical descriptions when trying to explain why Orkut is so successful in Brazil. Interviewed by Reuters, Dr. E. N. Saad Corra attributed the phenomenon to the fact that Brazilians are by nature gregarious (Alerigi, 2004, s.p.). Talking to Universia Brasil, the sociologist A. F. Testa also found that the Brazilian nature, a very inquisitive and sociable people, was the principle reason for the affinity for on-line relationship tools (Testa in Marques, 2005, s.p.). Even Dr. M. Coutinho, who provided several factors of distinct natures for the popularity of Orkut in Brazil, did not forget to mention that applications for computer mediated communications in general tended to be popular amongst the Latin people, such as the Brazilians, as these are more communicative than the Anglo-Saxons. (UOL, 2005, s.p.). Across several Orkut communities, a large number of users (most often from Brazil, but not always) have also repeatedly linked the flood of Brazilians to
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Orkut to positive characteristics such as friendliness, cheerfulness and a good sense of humor. Observing the behavior of Brazilian users of Orkut, however, such descriptions would appear to be, at best, sarcastic. Many communities, topics and posts created by a significant sector of the Brazilian Orkut users bear witness to a frightening level of aggressiveness and intransigence toward in the main (but not exclusively) non Brazilians, and most notably toward the Americans. (Figure 5). In placing people with distinct cultural backgrounds in contact with one another, SNSs offer themselves as privileged arenas for the exercise of cultural hybridization as described by Garca-Canclini (2003) as well as for the enactment of the Clash of Civilizations announced by Huntington (1996). Not that the trans-cultural interactions on Orkut are, or even could be, just one type or the other. Certainly there are variations that range from effective co-operation to outright conflict that can be found. What is significant is that the nationalist tone to the confrontations between Brazilians and Americans on Orkut is a typical event in zones of intercultural contact and, as such, a predictable outcome of the cultural interchanges made possible by SNSs. Going beyond the confines of Orkut, the age of globalization is also the age of nationalist resurgence, expressed both in the challenge to established nation-states and in the widespread (re)construction of identity on the basis of nationality, always affirmed against the alien (Castells, 1998, p. 27).
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Figure 5: Examples of anti-USA posts and communities. At the top right, the community Eu Odeio os EUA - I Hate the USA19, created on June, 15, 2004. The description says (in translation from the Portuguese)For those who simply HATE THE NORTH AMERICAN WAY OF BEING. Arrogance, disrespect and stupidity This phrase is written in president BUSHs toilet. This is followed by FOR THOSE WHO SIMPLY HATE THE AMERICAN WAY TO BE!!!! in English). A little lower and to the left, the community Eu Odeio os Estados Unidos20 , created about a month later on July 16th, 2004. The description says (in translation) For those who think the same way as me. Lets send those sons of @#$%&* to the fifth level of hell).
The Community has 27,039 members in February 2006, when the official language is Portuguese. http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=95875. 20 In English, I Hate the United States. As of February 2006 the official language is Portuguese and there are 8,536 members. http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=174663.
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15 FRAGOSO, Suely, WTF a Crazy Brazilian Invasion. In: ESS, Charles ; SUDWEEKS, Fay ; HRACHOVEC, Herbert (orgs) ; CATaC 2006 - Fifth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, 2006, Tartu. Estonia. School of Information Technology - Murdoch University, 2006. v. 1. p. 255-274. Below these are examples of posts made in the community No Americans Yes Brazilians21 under the topic O que vcs mais odeiam nos Americanos? (What you most hate about the Americans). The first post, originally in Portuguese, say: 11/10/2004, 10:45 PM What you most hate about the Americans? Say what you most hate about this little people who think that they are better than the rest of the world why then dont they build a wall around their country and separate themselves from the rest of the world??? 12/8/2004, 4:42 AM The nationality... the simple fact of their being Americans. And below, the two more recent posts read 11/7/2005, 9:55 AM I hate them for being retarded!!! / The North-Americans are idiots, I hate them because they think that only they make up America.../and for their thinking that we live in the middle of a jungle and hunt monkeys to survive... / also I hate them for thinking that they are the best in the world, whilst Russia has much more destructive power than the USA... / because they are racists(not generalizing) / because they are STUPID!!!!!!!!(generalizing)... / because they are full of themselves and they are crap... / because their president is a S of a whore.../ because the only good US presidents were assassinated !!! / because they think that they are the most superior race on the planet ... / because they think that they will rule the world !!!! / I Hate the North - Americans !!!!!! 2/10/2006, 6:57 PM Because they are a bunch of rednecks (this last Word is in English in the original, followed by an explanatory translation in Portuguese in parentheses)
Understood as the belonging to a specific Nation State, nationality is far from being the primary source of identification. The modern Nation-States, after all, resulted from the relatively recent and often violent processes of the suppression of differences with the intent of constructing an apparently cohesive national community. It is just because of the association between nativity and rulership that the Nation-State has become a fundamental, but not for this any less artificial or agonistic, source of meaning for modern cultural identities. (Bauman, 2005, p. 25). In the case of the confrontations between the Brazilians and the users from the USA on Orkut, national identity appears to be a particularly fragile point of support. Both Brazil and the USA are the result of the relatively recent unification of territories in the New World, whose native inhabitants were subjugated to the point of completely losing all significance when compared to the colonizing populations. New World people are almost exclusively composed today of the descendents of European colonizers, African slaves and other more recent immigrants of more diverse ethnicity. That the voices of these multi-ethnic, and to a great degree multi-cultural, crucibles should be raised taking their respective national identities as the basic motivation and war cry is, at the very least, paradoxical. More surprising still is to see
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http://www.orkut.com /Community.aspx?cmm=409912.
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emerge from the Brazilian side of this some of the most violent xenophobic manifestations in the Orkut communities. We are dealing with, after all, a people that pride themselves in their friendliness as much as they do in the national culture which boasts a multiplicity of cultural hybridisms which, in fact, permeate and constitute the experience of Brazil (from the culinary to the religious, including the national language and the racial blending). The national identities appear in the topics and posts in the Orkut communities as the rallying call of a defensive fight, in which a smaller and weaker group (in this case, the Brazilians) are resisting the yoke of a larger and more powerful (the US users) group. This construction draws on a historical consistency that makes it almost inevitable to accept as an explanation, thus seen, for the aggression of the Brazilians against the Americans on Orkut, the expression of the resentment cultivated by American Imperialism over many decades. In fact some anti-USA manifestations express relatively direct resentment of the international policies of the G. W. Bush administration, such as the inevitable references to the invasion of Iraq and to the non adherence to the Kyoto Protocol. It is also not hard to find posts that relate the antipathy to the USA to the American interference in Latin America during the Cold War No to Kyoto? Have a Katrina22 Torture in Iraq, shame on you!!23 Imperialist SOBs!!!24 A more systematic observation of the aggressive manifestations of Brazilians in Orkut allows it to be seen however that in the vast majority of cases the target of the violence is not specifically the USA but is the English language. It is almost impossible not to know, or even to disagree with the contention, that English is the language most widely used nowadays for intercultural communication. It is worth remembering though that despite the total number of people capable of communicating in English being estimated at a billion individuals as of the end of the XXth century (Ianni, 1999, p. 59), this quantity represents only around 15% of the world population (estimated at 6,5 billion in February 2006, United
No a Quioto? Toma o Katrina Community created in September 18, 2005. http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=5121731. 23 Torturas no Iraque, que vergonha !!Tpic created in July 28, 2005, 6:37 AM in Community Eu Odeio os Estados Unidos (I Hate the United States). The Community was created in September 2, 2004, http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=370032. 24 Imperialistas filhos da puta!!! Tpic created in May, 19, 2004, 12:23 AM in Community Anti-bush & Estadunidenses (Anti-bush & US citizens). The Community was created in April 9, 2004. http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=39450.
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States Department of Commerce, 2006). It is evident that even amongst this 15% there are variations in the understanding of spoken English and in the ability to read, speak and write English. Brazilians, in the majority, only know very little of English language. Contrary to how many imagine the situation, English is not widely used in Brazil (nor, possibly, in the majority of countries in South America). Classes in Brazilian universities, for example, are held in Portuguese (with rare exceptions which quickly become polemical even if the language used is Spanish). Brazil is a long way away from any major country where English is the official language (the only relatively close places are Guyana and the Falkland Islands) or is widely spoken. Air travel is proportionately expensive in Brazil and the purchasing power of the Brazilian currency (Real) is significantly lower than the currencies of North America, Europe and Australasia. For these reasons there are relatively few Brazilians, even amongst the priveleged elite who have access to the Internet, who travel outside of Latin America. At least until the, recent and still incipient25, expansion of subscription television, even the mediatic culture had no effect on this situation as all of the foreign material shown on Brazilian broadcast television is dubbed into Portuguese. At the cinema, films are subtitled and, principally when they are films for children, are frequently dubbed as well. Learning English (or, in fact any foreign language, with the exception of Spanish for those that live close to the frontiers) is, for the vast majority of Brazilians, an abstract exercise. Basic notions of the English language are normally taught in Brazilian schools and, as the profile of Internet users in Brazil is positively correlated with family income and higher levels of education, it is not surprising that the majority of Orkut users would be capable of reading interfaces and messages written in English. The distance however from there to being able to express oneself in written English sufficiently fluently to sustain ones arguments against native speakers is, without doubt, huge. Computer Mediated Communication made the first-person experience of the shrinking of the world and the approach to other cultures possible for a significant number of the Brazilian elite whose perspectives had not included international movement on the large scale. It is known, however, that cultural contact has instability as its most exciting and most stressful characteristic. After all, interaction with or the presence of aliens always implies a position close to the limits of comfort, at the edge of inadequacy:
To be totally or partially dislocated in all aspects, to not be totally anywhere (that is to say without restrictions or limits, without some aspect of the person Subscription TV was introduced into Brazil in the 1990s. At the end of 2005 the Associao Brasileira de Televiso por Assinatura (ABTA) estimated that only 7,7% of the total households in Brazil have subscriptions to these services (Marini, 2006, s.p.)
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overflowing and being seen as strange by others) can be an uncomfortable experience. . . . There is always something to explain, to apologize for, to hide, or on the contrary, to courageously parade, to negotiate, to offer, to trade. There are differences to be reduced or pardoned or, on the other hand emphasized and made clearer. Identities float around freely, some are of our own choosing but others are inflated and launched by people around us, and we have to be constantly alert to defend the former against the latter. (Bauman, 2005, p. 19).
Under such circumstances the ability to understand what others have to say is far from sufficient, as the urge to express ones ideas is essential to being acknowledged tangibly by others. Reduced to invisibility by the impossibility of expressing themselves, many Brazilian users have probably abandoned various computer networking services. In Orkut, however, the demographic data and the news concerning the trend indicated, from early on, the high possibility of encountering other users in the same interest community that were Brazilians. The structure of Orkut itself allows for the verification of this type of supposition by following the links to other users in the community of interest. With the presence of other Brazilians confirmed writing in Portuguese becomes a life buoy that allows for the re-conquest, still only partially, of their visibility. It would be supposed that, given such a situation, the number of Portuguese language communities would multiply, replicating subjects that had been only discussed in English. Despite this actually happening the creation of Portuguese language communities did not result in the Brazilians abandoning the English language communities or in their stopping posting in Portuguese or to arguing for, often in a very aggressive way, for their supposed right to do so:
Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English. Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe." "After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion (Alerigi, 2004, s.p.)
In 2006, there are still available in Orkut various instances where a community ownere appeals to the Brazilians to keep communication in the official language of the community. In the majority of cases such appeals are ignored by the Brazilian users(Figure 6). The attitude is similar to that expressed by Silva (2005, s.p.) in addressing the question of fake profiles in his Top ten reasons orkut is popular in Brazil: "we know this is wrong, but why play by the rules if this is a place for fun and entertainment?
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Brazilians often act as if the rules of Orkut do not apply to them. An interesting interpretation of this feature of the Brazilian culture can be found in the work of the Brazilian anthropologist R. Da Matta (1978,1984,1985) who identifies, in the permanent need to situate oneself between institutions and values that are in principle incompatible, the roots of the Brazilian capacity to not only live between the two opposed logics, but to adhere to both and each of them at the same time.
Figure 6: Just six months after the creation of the Community Alice in Wonderland (March 11, 200426,) the first topic in Portuguese appeared: Wizard of OZ vs. Alice in Wonderland!!! The first post reads What would happen if the Wizard of OZ appeared in front of Alice?. The Community owner (identified as being Dutch) replies very politely requesting that all posts should be in English. A few days later another user (apparently from the US) responds to the original message in English. Soon follows a childish post in Portuguese (Well...PERHAPS THEY WOULD SHARE THE SAME ACID), which kills the thread.
For Da Matta the origins of the essential disjunction and conformity to Brazilian reality reflect on the institution of a State apparatus that intended to create a specific type of society as opposed to a State that responded to the requirements
In 2006 the Community has the following description and definitions: Are you also bewondered and bewildered in life? Share your bewilderment here; Language - English; Location Netherlands, 5,700 members, http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=27250.
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of the social structure that supported it. The practice of treating everyone as equal before the law, which derives from the Northern European egalitarian tradition, would encounter an ethos that never ceased to exist in Brazil under which a person is important because they belong to a family and have colleagues and friends. It is the relationship which helps them as a human being and as a meaningful member of society. However in the modern individualistic ethos, which started with the Protestant Reform and the Industrial Revolution, family and society are what are constructed by individuals27. (Da Matta, 1984, p.45, added emphasis) The result is an institutional system divorced from the everyday practice, which Da Matta illustrates using an analogy of the space of the home and the street. In the archetypal Brazilian home there rules a family logic under which everyone has a determined and permanent place and inalienable and perpetual rights. In principle, everything and everyone that is in the space of a Brazilian home is unquestionably beautiful, good and above criticism. As an important and diversified moral space, the home . . . demarks a definitively. (Da Matta, 1984, p. 27) The street, on the other hand, is a depersonalized and dog eat dog space. Here who rules is not the father, brother, husband, the wife and the netweork of relationships and friendships that we have with a person, a friend. To the contrary, command is given to the authority that governs by law, which makes the whole world equal in the act of disempowering and even exploiting in an impious way (Da Matta, 1984, p.30). In Brazil, differently to in those societies based on clans or castes which exclude the notion of the individual but also to the Western societies - which exclude the person the two categories coexist, creating a double code. (Da
To follow the thinking of Da Matta, it is necessary to be clear about the distinction between the notions of individual and person which the author takes as his starting point. By individual De Matta understands an independent and autonomous entity which is capable therefore of wanting freedom and equality, with loneliness and love being the basic and the power to select and choose being one of their most basic rights. Under this construction society should be at the service of the individual, as opposed to being an injustice to be corrected (Da Matta, 1978, p, 181-182). The notion of person emphasizes the social belonging of the subject. Here one does not treat of the parallel equality of all but of the complementarity of each to form a totality that can only be so constituted when all of the parts are there. Instead of the terms of the society being contingent on the individual we have the opposite, the individual immersed in and contingent upon the society. The notion of person can thus be succinctly characterized as a collective aspect of individuality, a mask which is placed on the individual or individualized entity (lineage, clan, family, club, association etc.) which in this way is transformed into a social being. (Da Matta, 1978, p, 182).
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Matta, 1978, p. 190). Both the logic and morals of the home and of the street make up part, therefore, of the everyday Brazil, the experience of which is framed by the paradox of laws which should apply to everyone and relationships that evidently only function for those that have them. The result is a social system divided and even balanced between two basic social units: the individual (subject of the universal laws that modernize society) and trhe person (subject of social relationships, which carry the traditional aspects of the system) (Da Matta, 1984, p.95-96). To appeal, in such a system, to universal rules as the owners of Orkut communities do in reminding the Brazilian users of the existence of a defined language for communication in that community is to refuse to concede the distinction of familiarity to which each Brazilian user is accustomed. To make the same rule apply to all, to refuse to open exceptions in the name of relationships (many other users are also Brazilians) or emotions(why cant I use Portuguese if I want to?) is fair for the Northern European ethos, but appears as violence to many Brazilian users. The general rule, impersonal, functions amongst Brazilians as a euphemism for the negative or as a means of informing the other of their condition of anonymity or inferiority. As even the Brazilian legal system is populated by irreconcilable internal contradictions, in Brazil what is always looked for in any situation of conflict or dispute is the ritual of recognition that humanizes and personalizes the formal situations, helping everyone place in a hierarchy the persons implicated in the situation (Da Matta, 1985, p. 87). The Brazilians who ignore the official language of a community or even the requests to respect this by the owner, do not necessarily consider this rule to be wrong or inadequate. They understand, however, that as frequently happens in the world outside of the screen of their computers, the law can be forgotten, or at least limited in effect, so as not to apply in their case28. It is not a piece of trivial cynicism by the Brazilian users, but a way of behaving that is learned and practiced in everyday life to live, and sometimes survive, in a nation in which the formal laws of public life have nothing to do with the good rules everyday morality which govern our honor, respect and, above al, the loyalty that we owe to our friends, relatives and colleagues. (Da Matta, 1984, p. 104). Ignoring the requirement to write in English in communities defined to be of this language would thus be a typical Brazilian way of obeying an impossible order express yourself in English with the desire to remain in Orkut and interact within any of its communities. How, though, to also explain that Brazilian users also
It is worth remembering that, despite the penetration and use of the Internet in Brazil obtaining standards that are in the large part surprising, the Brazilians who have access to the Internet are relatively few and predominantly from the most favored classes.
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flooded the Orkut communities with an uncountable number of violent replies full of bad language? Da Matta associates the negative behavior of Brazilians with respect to the street and the impersonal things found there with the fact that, contrary to the safe and familiar environment of the home, the street is the location of the undesired individualization, of fighting and misbehavior. The zone where each has to look out for themselves . . . [as] the relational and hierarchical structure of our value constellation can no longer be used to mold morality. But to say each man for himself is to abandon the rigid social control that to some degree guarantees the pacification of spirits and provides order to things. (Da Matta, 1985, p. 61) In a culture where individualism and equality of rights are seen as negatives, any public location as is the case with Orkut is a no-mans land where behavior that would be unthinkable in domestic territories can be, if not adequate, acceptable. Thus there exists amongst Brazilians a predisposition toward aggressiveness in the public space of Orkut, which is accentuated by the emergence of an ethnically based nationalism which, as we have seen, reflects a sense of alienation and unjust exclusion or exclusion which is considered unjust typical of zones of cultural interchange. It is characteristic of resistence identities that they resort to the construction of trenches of resistence and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society (Castells, 1998, p.8), which is typical of what Brazilians do in Orkut. Whilst the aggression derives from a people whose stereotype refers to transgressions of a carnivalesque type (which, by definition, do not have consequences in real life) and, coherently, does not go beyond the borders of the virtual environment of Orkut, it becomes possible to take with good humor the attempts of the Brazilians to invert what they considered to be the oppressive logic of a dominant social group in Orkut. In February 2006 Orkut really is Brazilian. Many communities that discussed the Brazilian Invasion are reduced to ruins inhabited by the victorious users who have captured them, The heroes of the North American resistance who keep the light of discord burning in these areas are, in the most part, Fakesters, which everything indicates to be Brazilians who are missing the adrenaline rush of the hour of battle. There have emerged, however, new calls to capture Orkut which help us to remember that the exclusion of the excludent by the excluded (Castells, data, p.9) does not significantly change the order of things, it just reinforces the separations and boundaries, potentially provoking still further the moods of the various entities involved. Closing in, by number of users, on the North Americans, the Orkuteers of the Middle East (proportionally represented
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by the Iranians, Indians and Pakistanese) are preparing for a rerun, in their style, of the Brazilian Invasion. The principle theme under discussion has ceased to be the language used for Orkut communication, which has given way to a large number of Communities, Topics and Posts discussing questions related to the international situation outside the digital network. One can only hope that this time Orkut contributes to boost the reciprocal communicability and is not used once more as the ground for a battle between excluded and exclusionary identities the only likely outcome of which would be the reinforcement of its own exclusionary structure. Acknowledgements The English version of this article was revised by Robin Lane. References
Alerigi, A. 2004, Brazil Internet Craze Angers English Speakers. Reuters report 17 July, 2004. Copy of the original report available on-line at http://www.ladlass.com/ice/archives/008610.html [Jan 06] Anderson, L. 2003, Attack of the Smartasses, SFWeekly, Aug 13, 2003. Available on-line at http://www.sfweekly.com/ [Dec 05] Antunes, A. 2004, Brazilians in orkut, Orkut News, Wednesday, December 08, 2004. Available on-line at http://media.orkut.com/columns/0008.html [Jan 06] Bad, F. 2004, Folha de S. Paulo, 30 de junho de 2004. Disponvel at Folha de S. Paulos on-line archive at http://www.folha.uol.com.br [acesso restrito] [Jan 06] Barabasi, A.-L. Linked. New York, Plume, 2002 Bauman, Z. 2005, Identidade. Entrevista a Benedeto Vecchi. Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar. Bechar Israeli, H. 1995, FROM <Bonehead> TO <cLoNehEAd>:NICKNAMES, PLAY, AND IDENTITY ON INTERNET RELAY CHAT, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication JCMC, 1(2), Play & Performance in Computer-Mediated Communication, September 1995. Available on-line at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue2/index.html [Feb 06] Castells, M. 1998, The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II. Oxford, Blackwell. Da Matta, R. 1978, Carnavais, Malandros e Heris: para uma sociologia do dilema brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro, Guanabara Koogan. Da Matta, R. 1984, O que faz o Brasil, Brasil? Rio de Janeiro, Rocco. Da Matta, R. 1985, A Casa e a Rua. Rio de Janeiro, Guanabara Koogan. Dibell, J. 1993, A Rape in Cyberspace, : Village Voice, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 51, December 21, 1993. Available on-line at http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/articles/village_voice.html [Feb 06]
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GAID-FGV, 2003, Mapa da excluso digital. Coordenao M. C. Neri. Rio de Janeiro,FGV/IBRE, CPS. Report available on-line at http://www.fgv.br [mai 03] and complementary data in CDROM. Garcia-Canclini, N. 2003, Culturas Hbridas: estratgias para entrar e sair da modernidade. So Paulo, Edusp. Glasner, J. 2005, We're a Hit in Manila! Now What? Wired News March 31, 2005. Available online at http://www.wired.com/ [Dec 05] Hempell, A. 2004, Orkut at eleven weeks: An exploration of a new on-line social network community. Available on-line at http://www.anthonyhempell.com/papers/orkut/ [Feb 04] Huntington, S.P. 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, Touchstone. Ianni, O. 1999, Sociedade Global, histria e transculturao in J.V.T. dos Santos (org.), Violncia em tempo de globalizao . So Paulo, Hucitec, p. 43-64. IBGE 2006, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatstica. Available on-line at http://www.ibge.gov.br Ibope/Netratings, 2006a, Novo recorde de navegao no acesso residencial da Internet no Brasil, IBOPE/NetRatings, Internet, Notcias, 04/01/2006. Available on-line at http://www.ibope.com.br/ Ibope/Netratings, 2006b, Internet residencial brasileira cresceu 12,4% durante o ano de 2005, IBOPE/NetRatings, Internet, Notcias, 18/01/2006. Available on-line at http://www.ibope.com.br/ Kahney, L. 2003, Fotolog: where Art meet T&A, Wired News, June 09, 2003. Available on-line at http://www.wired.com/ [Feb 06] Leite, P. 2005, Site de relacionamento supera e-mail no pas. Folha de S. Paulo, 15/07/2005. Available on-line at http://www.folha.uol.com.br Magalhes, A. 2005, O que esperar da Internet nos prximos anos? Wnews. Available on-line at http://www.wnews.com.br/site/colunas/ [Feb 06] Marini, A.R. 2006, TV Por assinatura: perto de casa, longe do bolso in Frum Nacional pela Democratizao da Comunicao, Boletim E-Frum, 85, 01/27/2006. Available on-line at Observatrio da Imprensa, http://observatorio.ultimosegundo.ig.com.br/artigos.asp?cod=366TVQ002 [Feb 06] Saito, A.C. and C.E. Valim 2005, Internauta brasileiro tem recorde de acesso, Gazeta Mercantil November, 25, 2005, Caderno C, p. 1. Available on-line at http://www.cgi.br/infoteca/clipping/2005/midia124.htm [Jan 06] Silva, J. G. B. da, 2005, Top Ten Reasons orkut is Popular in Brazil, Orkut News, February 23, 2005. Disponvel on-line at http://media.orkut.com/articles/0109.html [Dec 05] Tachibana, G. 2005, Letter From the Editor: How Orkut Exploded in Brazil, Orkut News, February 16, 2005. Available on-line at http://media.orkut.com/ [Feb 05] Torres, R. 2005, Brazilians in orkut, No. 2, Orkut News, February 09, 2005. Available on-line at http://media.orkut.com/articles/0100.html [Feb 05] United States Department of Commerce 2006, US Census Bureau. On-line at http://www.census.gov/ (Feb 06] UOL 2005, Bate-Papo com Marcelo Countinho, April 18, 2005. A copy of the chats prompt has been published on-line by Ibope/Netratings: Confira a ntegra do chat com Marcelo Coutinho. Available on-line at http://www.ibope.com.br/ [Jan 06]
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Zilveti, M. 2004 Fotoblogue vira mania entre brasileiros, Folha de S. Paulo, July, 14 2004. Disponvel at Folha de S. Paulos on-line archive at http://www.folha.uol.com.br [acesso restrito] [Jan 05]
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