Twitter Use in Protests in Argentina and Brazil: A Brief Review

For the last two years, I've been working on and off on my International Studies Capstone Honors Thesis.  I looked at how Twitter is used in protests in Argentina and Brazil.  I chose this topic because I was fascinated by how protests worked in these two countries.  While the protests may have inconvenienced me while I was in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, they're important functions in these societies. 

In order to come to my conclusions, I conducted an ethnographic controlled comparison in order to compare Argentina and Brazil with as much control as possible.  I conducted interviews in Spanish and Portuguese with Argentine and Brazilian adults over age 18 who are politically active and have active Twitter accounts.  I also looked at newspaper articles from "O Globo" and "La Nación."  I'll highlight here a few key points I learned during my research.

1. Different social media are used at different points in the planning, protesting, and reflection of social protests.  Everyone I interviewed for my study used more than one social media platform in addition to Twitter.  Each platform had its own function and was generally only seen as being useful for one type of media-- for example, YouTube is good for sharing videos but not good for sharing text information.  With both the Argentine and Brazilian informants, I noticed the following organizational structure:

1. Facebook (and formerly Orkut in Brazil) is used to organize the protest and get everyone to the same place at the same time.
2. Twitter and Whatsapp are used to share information in real-time, including where people are located, if police are responding, and what chants should be shared.
3. YouTube, Instagram, and blogging platforms like tumblr are used after the protest to document what happened and create a lasting image of the protest.

2. Physically attending protests is important.  In countries with clientelism as a mainstay of their political system, voting and being physically present at political events is important.  Protests are a way for citizens to show the government how they feel about a certain issue.  In the newspaper articles I read, the number of supports of something on Facebook was not seen to be nearly as important as the number of people in the streets. 

3. Twitter use is similar during protests, even though the nature of protest is different in Argentina and Brazil.  From my experience in both countries, I noticed differences in what happened at the protests.  In Argentina, I learned that protests may tend to be more serious and have one specific cause.  They may be organized by a union or online.  One informant told me that the seemingly "spontaneous" protests are seen as more legitimate than the planned protests.  In Brazil, protests are seen as a social event or a party.  It's a place to go with friends or listen to music.  However, in both countries, the usage of social media, particularly Twitter, tends to be the same.

My research raises important questions about the benefits and limitations of Twitter's technical characteristics and how its used in different cultural contexts.  It adds another narrative about how Twitter is used in protests, and my project can be used to compare and contrast different protests in which social media played a role, such as the Arab Spring.  It is important to learn more about how developing countries use social media and how these technologies can be implicated in social change.

Presenting my research at the International Studies Capstone Symposium in April 2015.  (Photo Beth Zweig.)

This is just an overview of my project!  I'd love to discuss more and learn your opinions.  If you have other ideas of concepts to consider or a relevant article, post it in the comments!

Tango Time

While I was packing up my things to return home for Thanksgiving Vacation, I came across my tango shoes.  Still wrapped in the five cent plastic bags I bought at the grocery store in Argentina, I could see their fake gemstones sparkling and their too-tall heels poking through.

I've never written about how I ended up in Tango class in Buenos Aires-- I desperately needed an Arts and Humanities General Education class, and my Spanish Advisor suggested that I could maybe stretch and get a tango class to count.  After some paperwork and creative syllabus translation, I enrolled in what IU calls "Argentine Rhythms and Dance."  The course offered in Argentina was just for exchange students and was half dance and half theory and history of tango.   

I was apprehensive about this class.  I went to a tango class in August, and the instructor told me to relax, loosen up, and not be so awkward several times during the one-hour lesson.  (This is especially impressive because there were 25 people in the class.)  The tango is also a passionate, expressive, and warm dance, and Americans by nature are not.  I have no rhythm nor ability to dance in an organized way, but I was up for the challenge.

The first order of business was to get tango shoes.  I don't own heels for going out in the evenings, so I had to buy myself a pair in Buenos Aires.  However, I have incredibly large feet even for U.S. standards, so I knew this would be a challenge.  I went around to all the stores in and around the mall near my apartment, and no one had anything in my size.  I ended up asking Delfi, my host, and she recommended that I try a transvestite store.  Thankfully, on my way to that kind of store, I came across another place that had one pair of shoes in my size.  I remember hugging the salesperson with excitement and relief.  

The class itself was one of my more memorable academic experiences  Tango is the combination of musical traditions, cultural practices, and linguistic elements of the gauchos (Argentine cowboys), immigrants from Europe, and African slaves brought to the region.  Every tango is a history lesson and a case study in the evolution of dance and social relations in Argentina.  For our class, we took field trips to see a musical about a tango singer who falls on hard times, the national tango museum, and even to a milonga (used here as a place where one goes to dance the tango).  I liked getting to be involved in the tango culture and to learn firsthand how the dance evolved.  

My tango class.  The man and the woman in the middle in the black are our professors.  Because John was the only male student, we all had to learn both the lead and following parts of tango.

And the dance itself... tango is more like a dance framework.  There are certain moves that can be done in any order, arranging and rearranging with the music and mood of the dancers.  The relationship between the partners is important.  If the person dancing the lead part knows what he/she is doing, tango is easy.  The lead partner's hand movements physically keep the other person from going in the wrong direction.  This doesn't mean there aren't risks to tango-- you have to watch out for heels flying in the air, crashing into other pairs, and hitting your partner with any part of your body.  

At the end of the semester, I still had a lot of room for improvement.  I went to a tango dance night with a few of my friends, and to my horror there was a free dance portion of the evening.  An older gentleman named Marcelo asked me to dance.  I hadn't worn my tango shoes for fear of towering over everyone at the event (I'm over six feet tall in those shoes).  I was explaining this to Marcelo, who replied, "Well, it's a good thing you're not wearing them, because then it'd be like dancing with Michael Jordan!"  My class really got a kick (pun intended) out of that anecdote.  

Reflections One Year Later

I’ve been back in the States about a week and a half now, and it has been sort of a strange adjustment.  I have been trying to keep busy.  I read To Kill a Mockingbird, partly because I was genuinely interested in it and partly because I was tired of pretending like I had read it.  I am learning how to drive a manual car (harder than it looks), how to use LinkedIn (leave a comment if you can explain it to me, I would be most appreciative), and how to use banking infrastructure again (forgot ATM pin, had to think for a few minutes while someone impatiently waited behind me in the drive-thru line). 

While I have been experiencing some culture shock, I sort of know what to expect.  I came back to the states after being in Israel for five months when I was in high school, and I was home for a couple weeks in February.  I’ve had occasional slip-ups when I use Spanish instead of English or use a phrase that doesn’t quite translate the same in English.  (I’ve also been saying queue instead of line—unclear why that’s happening.)  It’s not so much a shock as a transition for me.  There’s nothing new here, and I know what is cultural appropriate.  I just had gotten used to the Argentine way of some things, like the aloof servers at restaurants or the friendlier people waiting in line.  It’s been a change adjusting back to small town Indiana, where I rarely leave the house without seeing someone I know. 

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Brownie, dulce de leche, whipped cream.  Delicious.

I’m most in shock by the fact that a year of my life has passed.  My birthday is tomorrow, and I cannot help but think back to my last birthday for comparison.  I had been in Buenos Aires for a week, and I still didn’t have many friends nor a sense of the city.  My birthday was on a Thursday, and we had to go to the Catholic University for orientation.  I went with a group of other girls who lived nearby, but it felt as though we were on the bus forever and I felt so lost and uncomfortable.  The orientation was overwhelming, and by the time I had figured out where to sign up, the few people I did know from my study abroad program had left.  I wasn’t sure what to do, it was raining, and I went home in tears.  As I sat in the dark in the apartment, my host, Delfi, came home and couldn’t figure out why I was so upset.  She went out and came back with a small brownie cake—brownie, dulce de leche, whipped cream—and sang happy birthday to me in English, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.  I then went back to the study abroad office to sign up for classes, and I wasn’t sure what anything was or what I was picking.  I returned home, and my (developing) friend Haley wanted to know what we were doing for my birthday.  I didn’t want to do anything because I was so down, and she insisted that we go out. 

The gang at Sugar.

After researching bars online, we picked one, and gathered a few other girls we thought seemed friendly to go.  I left the house and got lost, which was the norm, and ended up taking two taxis to get there.  In both cabs, I seriously contemplated just going home and going to bed.  The bar we wanted to go to was closed, so we talked around until we found another bar, Sugar.  We sat, we drank a little, we chatted with some strange Germans, and I went home. 

None of this was remarkable on my birthday, and for the longest time, I said that August 1, 2013, was one of the worst days of my entire study abroad trip.  However, looking back one year later, it is all incredibly significant – Delfi came to be my strongest support system, the Catholic University came to be a source of great learning and great frustration, the girls I went to the that bar with are some of my best friends to this day, and one month later, on September 1, I met my boyfriend at the same bar.  In the moment, it is hard to recognize all of the progress and positives, but looking back, I see that my twenty-first birthday was important in many ways. 

The other day, I was at the gym.  I couldn’t help but notice the differences between the YMCA and my gym in Argentina: there were more than 2 elliptical machines, the TV wasn’t showing creepy CSI re-runs, no one was drinking mate, and everyone kept to themselves and didn’t chat with their neighbors.  After an excruciating 33 minutes on the elliptical, I decided to walk a few laps to cool off.  The track at this gym is elevated and goes around two basketball courts and the area with the machines.  As I walked, I looked down on the basketball courts to see some young children at camp playing.  There were two kids in Colts Jerseys (#12 and #87) and another kid in a Pacers t-shirt.  There was one other kid, a little taller than the rest of them, wearing a full Argentine National Football team Messi outfit.  He had the jersey, the official #10 shorts, the socks, everything. 

This little reminder of Argentina, thousands of miles away in Northeast Indiana, brought a smile to my face.  I know that Indiana will always be important to me and that Argentina has a special place in my heart too.  I’m looking forward to seeing my friends, both old and new, in North America this fall and getting back to mi Buenos Aires querido (my beloved Buenos Aires) when I can.