A new arena is gathering steam and significance in the Brazilian Internet space: the football blogs. It should be no surprise given how natives are impassioned for the game, and how the latest results of the many championships become part of the casual chit-chat everywhere. Day by day, fervent fans are finding out that blogs and other media possibilities — podcasts, webcasts, foruns and chats — are invaluable tools to display, promote and exchange opinions about the many games, and also to express their passion for their favorite football club teams.
The most evident feature brought by the wave of new entrants in the sports chronicle on the web is the customized report and commentary produced by teams’ fans. Since TV transmissions of football games started in Brazil, referees are not the only ones to be sujected to biased scrutiny of the fans. The obligatory account of the games by speakers and commentators from major TV networks, regular owners of exclusive broadcasting rights, also suffer the sharp analysis — and fiery reactions — from the opinionated crowd of the many clubs’ supporters.
Two of the biggest media companies in Brazil are currently involved is court cases that similarly raise the issue of freedom of speech and press even though the media finds itself on opposite sides of the issue in the two cases. The influential newspaper ‘Folha de SP’ is facing a series of lawsuits filed by followers of an evangelical church, while Veja, the top weekly magazine, and some of its main editors are going after a blogger through another series of lawsuits. Taking the larger view, the Brazilian blogosphere is uniquely pointing out the similarity and contradictions revealed by the connectedness of both situations.
Folha’s problems started a week ago when Elvira Lobato, a reporter who is now facing about 50 individual suits, published an article about the finances of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God – IURD, and its connections with tax havens. The piece lists the TV network (2nd national audience), 23 TV and 40 radio stations, besides the other 19 companies — 2 newspapers included — that forms the church’s ‘empire’, but the suits actually complain about IURD being portrayed as a ’sect’.
The issue has called RSF’s attention, and the ABI [Brazilian Press Association] has released a note [pt] describing IURD’s reaction as an ‘unprecedented coercive campaign in Brazilian media history’. While the suits against Folha has generated such compelling response from traditional media and its backers, a very different approach is being adopted towards the legal dispute between Veja magazine and the journalist-turned-into-blogger Luis Nassif. As expected, the blogosphere has much to say about that.
When you are invited up on the terrace
of the Casa de Jorge Amado Foundation
to watch from above the row of soldiers;
almost all black
beating on the necks of black good for nothings
of mulatto thieves and other almost white ones
treated like the black ones
just to show the other almost black ones
(and they are almost all black)
and the almost white poor like black ones
how it is that blacks, poor, and mulattos
and almost white ones, almost black and poor are treated
and it doesn’t matter if the eyes of the whole world
might for a moment be turned to the square
where the slaves were punished
and today a pounding of drums,
pounding of drums
with the purity of boys
in secondary school uniforms on parade day
and the epic grandeur of a people in formation
it attracts us, astonishes and stimulates us
nothing matters:
not the trace of the mansion’s architecture
not the lens from Fantástico,
not Paul Simon’s record
no one, no one is a citizen
if you go to the party there at Pelô,
and if you don’t go
think of Haiti, pray for Haiti
Haiti is here—Haiti is not here
And on TV, if you see a congressman
in badly concealed panic
when faced by any, absolutely any, any, any
plan for education that seems easy
that seems fast and easy
and will represent a threat to democratize
primary school education
and if this same congressman
should defend
the adoption of capital punishment
and the venerable cardinal should declare
that he sees so much soul in the fetus
and none in the criminal and if,
when you run a light, the old familiar light
red as usual
you notice on a street corner
a man pissing
on a shiny bag of garbage from Leblon
and when you hear the smiling silence of São Paulo
in response to the massacre
111 defenseless prisoners
but prisoners are almost all black
or almost black, or almost white
almost black and so poor
and poor men are rotten,
and everyone knows how blacks are treated
and when you go on holiday in the Caribbean
and when you go fuck without a condom,
and participate intelligently in the blockade of Cuba
Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti
Haiti is here, Haiti is not here.
“Elite Squad”, a much-hyped film about Rio’s special forces police is having its official launch today in Rio and São Paulo, and the nationwide premiere is scheduled for Oct. 12. The peculiar thing about this release is that an estimated crowd of 3.5 million people have already seen it before its debut. The [unauthorized] copy of the film can be viewed or downloaded from many different places on the web, and the speculation is that more than a million copies of the DVD have been sold on Brazilian streets across the past few weeks.
Praised as a “City of God 2″, but presenting a narrative based on a policeman’s perspective, the film is provoking heated debates across the country about the causes of violence in big cities. There are interesting discussions also on the morality of the widespread use of an unauthorized copy leaked to the web of an unreleased film. Surely, this case has made Brazilians go deeper into the actual meanings of piracy in the digital era, and it can turn out to be a defining moment for the audiovisual industry. Bloggers are all around it.
The Internet Governance Forum in Athens did an admirable job setting up a number of instruments for remote participation at the meetings. These include web casting, a discussion forum, live text chat, email, SMS, blog aggregation, and even submissions via video!
The effort was admirable — just the mere fact of the existence of such possibilities in Athens brought new elements into the process. But we could observe also that the remote participation procedures in Athens did not raise much interest. This is a serious problem if the IGF wants to project itself as a new kind of open framework for dialogue on Internet governance.
It’s not like there aren’t important topics being discussed: freedom of expression, cyber-crime, multi-lingualism on the net, surveillance, spam, etc. Certainly there are lots of potential interest, expertise and experience out there that could be integrated into the discussions.
In my view, the problem is that the “if you build it, they will come” approach doesn’t work for remote participation. It requires more.
The global debate on Internet governance will once again gather people from all over the world at UN’s IGF, this time in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The process was started last year in Athens, when more than 1,200 participants focused on discussion of the overarching issues tied to the future of information and communications technologies, including control over the Internet architecture and numbering and naming system, security, intellectual property, openness, connectivity, cost and multilingualism.
The IGF’s innovative multi-stakeholder format, designed to grant governments, NGOs, and commerce an equal seat at the table, was praised by many as an evolution from the bounds of classical diplomacy. But the role of the IGF as a pure discussion forum — “a neutral, non-binding and non-duplicative process” as the EU presidency put it — and the absence of a more formalized output were intensively discussed by several governments and NGOs, Brazilians included. Blogs report:
Great expectations and a good dose of self criticism will surely be present at the Second Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will take place in November in Rio de Janeiro. The occurrence of the IGF in Brazil was the result of a big effort of the local government, and the discussions will focus not only on the conventional issues related with the virtual environment, but also on the foundational purposes of the IGF process. In a significant evolution from its last meeting in Athens — which was characterized by the absence of deliberative power — the IGF in Rio will position the present Internet governance model and the IGF’s mandate as central themes of the forum.
II Forum de Governança da Internet – Dialógico
I was invited to represent the Brazilian Ministry of Culture in the conference panel “Making the Local Global: Virtual Worlds, Migration, and Linguistic Diaspora” of an event called ‘Interdependence Day‘ in Mexico City. I’ve met a fine man called Joshua Fouts (Director, USC Center on Public Diplomacy) at the iSummit in Rio last year, and he was really excited about connecting the work we do at the cultural hotspots with virtual worlds. We’ve been exchanging messages since then, but I kept telling him that Second Life’s platform needed some developments in order to be included in our program. Still, they wanted to hear about what we’ve been doing in Brazil in terms of using technology to outreach and enhance cultural bridges.
I managed to make a video containing a message from Minister Gilberto Gil on the panel’s theme, and prepared myself to go to Mexico. But then, I was given the wrong information about the need for a Brazilian to have a visa in order to visit Mexico, and so I was stopped in São Paulo and was not permitted to fly to Mexico City. The solution at hand was to participate in the panel through Second Life, and it worked out pretty well as you can see below.
César Salgado’s blog (via Altino)announces the launching of the English version of a youtube video which tells much about the lawless situation reigning in many parts of the Brazilian Amazon region.
Farmers and politicians of the Brazilian municipality of Juína (Mato Grosso state) hinders Greenpeace activists, OPAN (Native Amazon Operation) members and european journalists’s visit to the Enawene Nawe Indigenous Land. Watch truculence and intimidation scenes sufered by the crew in August 20th, 2007.
The Ashaninkas are the largest indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon and differently from the majority of the South American original dwellers, their cultural identity is greatly preserved. Apart from being among the native nations of the continent connected with the traditional use of Ayahuasca, the Ashaninkas are specially known for their use of beautiful cotton robes, or cushmas, which are woven by the Ashaninka women for the men of their tribe. Cushmas are an Ashaninka’s most prized possession and there is a very long tradition of giving and exchanging cushmas and cloth with nyomparis (or trading partners) which linked distant Ashaninka villages into cycles of meetings, collaboration and resource sharing.
Accounts from the beginning of the last century tells about some Ashaninka groups that escaped from the Peruvian “caucheiros” [rubber tappers], and today a few hundred of them live on the Brazilian side of the border. There are stories about the braveness of the skilled warriors who expulsed the wild Amahuakas from the area around the Amonia River in the Upper Juruá. These few groups achieved the ownership of their land in the 90s, after many decades of struggle against the successive waves of colonization, and nowadays they strive to engage in activities that can help them to communicate with the world, and better defend their land and their culture from their current enemies. Read the rest of this entry »
A traditional Brazilian newspaper launched an advertising campaign to promote its new website, and the core message of all video and visual pieces was based on a humorous approach of blogs as bad sources of information. One video piece went far enough as comparing bloggers with monkeys. As expected, the local blogosphere took it personally.
On its website, Talent Agency explains its new campaign to advertise Estadão’s website as follows: “The campaign exposes, in a playful way, the risks of searching sites on the Internet, managing to impart the newspaper’s website novelties“. I should say that it is a case of questionable sense of humor, to coarsely compare bloggers with… monkeys. Estadão against blogs? – Pensar Enlouquece
A new arena is gathering steam and significance in the Brazilian Internet space: the football blogs. It should be no surprise given how natives are impassioned for the game, and how the latest results of the many championships become part of the casual chit-chat everywhere. Day by day, fervent fans are finding out that blogs and other media possibilities — podcasts, webcasts, foruns and chats — are invaluable tools to display, promote and exchange opinions about the many games, and also to express their passion for their favorite football club teams.
Two of the biggest media companies in Brazil are currently involved is court cases that similarly raise the issue of freedom of speech and press even though the media finds itself on opposite sides of the issue in the two cases. The influential newspaper ‘Folha de SP’ is facing a series of lawsuits filed by followers of an evangelical church, while Veja, the top weekly magazine, and some of its main editors are going after a blogger through another series of lawsuits. Taking the larger view, the Brazilian blogosphere is uniquely pointing out the similarity and contradictions revealed by the connectedness of both situations.
The issue has called 
