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!