Internet connection as a fundamental infrastructure need for education and freedom in developing societies

One of the fundamental changes that I believe can be provided by Social Technologies is in terms of education, promoting a revolutionary change in its traditional concept, a system which does not encourage critical thinking, much less a sense of community, both essential in any collective action that brings fundamental social change for developing communities.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and a highly influential theorist of critical pedagogy believes dialogue is the key for the development of critical thinking and sense of community that will lead to social revolution from oppressed towards oppressors.

Contributing a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches from Plato, but very close to the modern Marxist ideas and anti-colonialist thinkers, Freire's theory is essentially a philosophy of hope. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), he differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. He advocates that education allows the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition; however, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation.

This approach, however, is not a pedagogy for the oppressed; it is rather a pedagogy of the oppressed. The subject should build his reality from the circumstances that give rise to the daily events of his life. The texts that the individual creates permit him to reflect upon and analyse the world in which he lives - not in an effort to adapt himself to this world, but rather as part of an effort to reform it and to make it conform to his historical demands.

According to Stanley Aronwitz (1993), Freire’s pedagogy is directed to break the cycle of psychological oppression by engaging students in confronting their lives in a dialogue. He posts the absolute necessity that the oppressed should be self-emancipated rather than ‘led’ on the basis of struggles around their immediate interests by an avant-garde of revolutionary intellectuals or external ‘help’. Freire posits the absolute necessity of the oppressed to take charge of their own liberation, including the revolutionary process which, in the first place, is educational. Freire makes a sharp distinction between political strategies that ‘use’ the movement to achieve political power and ‘fighting for an authentic popular organization’ in which the people themselves are the autonomous sources of political decisions.

Freire's proposed method implies two distinct and sequential moments: the first involves becoming conscious of the reality that the individual lives as an oppressed being subject to the decisions that the oppressors impose; the second refers to the initiative of the oppressed to fight and emancipate themselves from the oppressors. Freire does not believe that the lived situation consists only of a simple awareness of reality. Instead, he believes that the individual has a historical need to fight against the status that dwells within him. The efforts of the oppressed become focused and concrete through the type of learning that school really should give them, instead of encouraging them to adapt to their reality, as the oppressors themselves do.

In Freire the most important is ito establish a dialogue within a community. Since this implies the use of a language similar to that with which the individual is familiar, it is necessary to integrate oneself into the life of the individual - to study his language, practice and thought. Later, through the use of problematising education, these elements will come together to create knowledge, since it is not necessary to refer to other far away spaces to find opportunities and topics for study. Topics for learning can be found in the reality that surrounds the individual, it's just that they are hidden by the "limiting situations" that the oppressors create. These limits can disappear through the education that a problematising teacher, who moves from the particular to the general, encourages.

The oppressor, on the other hand, uses anti-dialogue in a variety of ways to maintain the status quo. He conquers the oppressed with an invariably unilateral dialogue, converting the communication process into an act of necrophilia. According to Freire’s view, the oppressors also seek to prevent people form uniting through dialogue. In their implicit discourse they warn that it can be dangerous to the "social peace" to speak to the oppressed about the concepts of union and organisation, amongst others. One of their principal activities is to weaken the oppressed through alienation, with the idea that this will cause internal divisions, and that in this way things will remain stable. Compared to those who opposed them, the oppressors seem to be the only ones that can create the harmony necessary for life. But this is really an effort to divide.

Similarly, anti-dialogue imposes a bourgeois model of life, which becomes among the masses a fertile ground for hidden manipulation of discourse. Organisation as an antidote to this manipulation is rare. A further characteristic of anti-dialogue is “cultural invasion”, of which the oppressed are the object. They are just this, objects, while the oppressors are the actors and authors of the process. It's a subliminal tactic that is used to dominate and that leads to the in-authenticity of individuals. The greater the level of mimicry on the part of the oppressed, the greater the tranquillity of the oppressors. What happens among the masses is a loss of values, a transformation in their form of speaking and, inexorably, support for the oppressor.

In contrast to all that has been explained above, stands collaboration as a form of community emancipation. This process does not happen through the presence of a messianic leader, but instead through the union created when a leader and the masses communicate and interact with each other to achieve their mutual goal of liberating themselves and discovering the world, instead of adapting to it. It happens when they offer each other mutual trust, so that a revolutionary praxis can be reached. Such a situation requires humility and constant dialogue on the part of all the participants, especially from outsiders such as NGOs and corporate responsibilities programmes who nowadays fail miserably in exercising any sort of dialogue, even in times where social technologies make that ever more accessible.

In addition to collaboration, union is also necessary if we are to achieve a common effort toward liberation. This implies a form of cultural action that teaches adherence to the revolutionary cause without falling into ideological hyperbole. Instead, the cause is described as it really is, as a human activity, not some exaggerated event.

The Internet is a rich source of information and a great environment for community-building and dialogue, crucial issues in Paulo Freire’s model of Education. As controversial it may seem, universal Internet access is perhaps the most important and crucial infrastructure improvement societies in development need in order to promote social change. With tools that will empower dialogue, sense of community and access to information, a community connected to the web is more likely to decide towards, and promote, other fundamental developments necessary for life-quality improvements from within the community, which also means freedom from oppressors and consequently a better life for its members.

How can Social Media revolutionise a whole country

Brazil is experiencing some revolutionary times, and it’s no coincidence that it is happening alongside the World Cup. The Brazilian passion for football is long known and the subject, especially when comes to the Seleção, is a matter of public knowledge and interest like nothing else.

The story starts right after Brazil’s victory against Ivory Coast, during the post-match interviews, when coach Dunga exploded in rage against a journalist from Globo Television.

But it is important here to understand the history of Globo in Brazil. The network has had a near monopoly in the Brazilian media for more than 40 years and has provenly influenced the country’s political history with partial journalism, according to its own interests, manipulating the audience of a country that already deals with deep educational problems.

Globo reacted the way it has (successfully) done in the past, changing their content according to their own particular views, paving their TV channel, newspapers, websites and magazines with criticism against Dunga, peaking with a text read by the journalist Tadeu Schmidt on Fantástico. The text read that

“(…) The coach Dunga presents a behaviour that is incompatible with the position it has in the command of the Seleção. But what needs to be clear in this episode is that we heavily root for the success of the team, and that the preoccupation of Globo Network’s journalism have always been of bringing the best information to you spectator, regardless of whoever is in command.”

This time however, something entirely different happened, and I believe it was that very last phrase the one which has ticked off Brazilians all over the country. Almost simultaneously to the end of Schmidts’s statement, a massive campaign entitled “Cala boca Tadeu Schmidt” (Shut up Tadeu Schmidt) exploded on Twitter, Orkut, Facebook and YouTube.

The speed with which the manifestations spread leads us to believe that it was not even a cascade of opinion (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welchs, 1998), but that millions of people had the same feeling at the same time and, thanks to Social Networking, were able to share it with each other, transforming it in a collective upbring in favour of their coach and against Globo that took enormous proportions online and offline, on Social and Traditional media, in Brazil and abroad.

Globo, scared of the unprecedented bad publicity generated against them, backed down and stopped/erased every bit of criticism against the coach. On the following game, after one of the commentators started to over-criticize Dunga, the head commentator immediately told him, on the air, to “change the subject now.”

What is clear for anyone who understands marketing and consumer behaviour is that the public today has every means possible to unveil the information and find out about the real truth of any matter. It has become impossible to fool or mislead people and, most importantly, when they find out, consumers have all the tools necessary to share and publicly destroy any brand that will try to do it.

If you take in consideration the life story of Dunga, a notably hard working sportsman who not only has captained Brazil’s World Cup victory of 1994 but has been doing a great job in coaching the actual team, and the shady history of Globo’s journalism, it was not hard for the public to make the decision of whom to support.

What’s fantastic here is the vanguard ability and inclination of the Brazilians to socialize and make use of technology tools to collectively raise towards what they think it is not right. It is no short of a real and unprecedented revolution, and I am very hopeful that the incident will landmark a new time of critical thinking against injustice and positive change to a country in desperate need of fundamental social improvement. And it makes perfect sense that it has football involved in it.

Volcano rush: Place bets on your flight departure times!

Clearly inspired in that Seinfeld episode "The Diplomat's Club", when Kramer loses all his money betting on flight arrivals at the airport, these guys are bringing that concept to real life. With the Volcano wager, just to spice things up.

Are we just a bunch of Digital Conformists? A brief look into what would Marx and Hall think of Social Technologies

Digital technologies have evolved into a state of omnipresence and invisibility that has had a great impact on culture. The concept of culture of Stuart Hall and the British cultural studies differs from what was thought by Karl Marx. The views of both authors on culture are antagonic in both model and uses as a social participant.

Karl Marx argued that the economy is the base and the foundation factor in society and that it is supported by the superstructure (that includes cultural production such as film, literature and music), which plays the secondary role of support to the establishment in place. According to Marx, the superstructure is determined by the economy and culture in society reflect the value of its base, therefore, the values of the dominant culture.

Hall rejected Marx’s reductive notion of culture as a passive, secondary, reflection in order to stress its active, primary, constructive role in society. Where Marxists would argue that economics determines cultural production, Hall argues that cultural production also determines the social and, thus, the economic climate. Cultural production has real political and ideological effects in the sense that it erodes traditional class alliances, resulting in ‘a sense of classlessness’. More importantly, if popular culture is not fixed, or guaranteed in advance by the economic base then its meaning and function can be negotiated and reconfigured through cultural intervention.

The incorporation of cultural dimensions into the popular media conceived that people were no longer empty and victimized receivers but were creative participants and culturally inserted individuals. Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership and appraised the oppositional potential of various youth subcultures. Cultural studies came to focus on how subcultural groups resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities.

Individuals who conform to dominant dress and fashion codes, behaviour, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream groups, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans). Individuals who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standardised models.

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By disrupting with the Marxist concept of culture, Hall took a step forward into studying the popular culture and its participation in modern society, what can serve to analyse the upcoming of the Digital Culture.

Today’s society, through all the developments made over the past 20 years, revolutionised the way people live, by immersing them in digital technology. Digital technology’s omnipresence and its increasing invisibility had the effect of making it “natural”. A whole generation of “digital natives” take digital technology for granted and have the sense that it has evolved into its present form naturally, in a sort of digital nature state.

This naturalization has transformed the way in which people interact with popular culture. Receivers, with total access to it, naturally replicating, sharing and interacting with it, became even more active than perhaps Hall could have imagined. In many ways, that confirmed his theories of a culturally active involvement of the receiver in the media process.

A super active receiver, with a lot of choice and all the sharing tools necessary, is better equipped than ever to establish their own counter culture and style. In a question of days, maybe hours, a group in London can identify with one in New York and a web of people with the same interests was formed. The 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s was a powerful demonstration of how urban popular culture raised up to the mainstream like never before and how these movements had almost immediate replications in different part of the globe.

By the mid 2000s however, the popularisation of social digital technology produced a much deeper and revolutionary change to the reception’s nature of popular culture forever.

If digital technology produced super active receivers, social technology has turned every receiver also into a potential source of content. Popular culture is no longer necessarily edited by the media and is happening alongside of it, which gives incredible potential for people to resist to the dominant culture and produce their own. Henry Jenkins called that phenomenon, Participatory Culture: “We’re seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests.” (Jenkins, 2006)

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But here is where Marx’s definition of culture may start to gain value again. When Hall’s views of popular resistance by culture were finally put in an environment where it could exercise all of its potential, when technologies finally empowered people with cultural creative subversive means, all that can be seen is the reproducing or, at the most – as Jenkins put it – the mere reworking of the content produced by the established media.

Back in 1991, W. Russel Neuman pointed out how the power of media conglomerates had affected society’s critical thinking. For him, mass audience has a semi-attentive, entertainment-oriented mindset shaped by the decades of mass media influence. This laziness can now easily be observed on Youtube where its audience is highly concentrated, either on user-generated content that mimic or parodies traditional media content, on traditional media content shaped for the internet or on viral videos produced by large enterprises to promote their products.

Canadian media scholar, Pierre Lévy, however, in his book “Collective Intelligence” has a much more optimistic view on the participatory culture. In his book “Cyberculture” he predicted that the power emerged from networking technologies would serve as a strong corrective to those traditional sources of power. Jenkis added to that in 2006, by saying that people are still just learning how to exercise that power – individually and collectively. He still believes that once they do, they might finally start using that power the way Stuart Hall would have imagined.

So far, however, pretty much all that can be seen in terms of culture in social media is a replication of mainstream media. New technologies revolutionised the way popular culture is distributed but not its content. Fan culture, TV shows and mainstream pop music still dominates popular culture, maybe even more so than ten years ago. Information about the war on Iraq is still as superficial and partial as it was in Vietnam times and user-generated content is hardly connected with any pursuit of subversive change and generally of very bad taste.

Rupert Murdoch says Wall Street Journal iPad App Brings in 64,000 Subscribers

If the numbers are indeed hot and don't include people who have downloaded the app for the free two week trial or existing WSJ subscribers that have got it for free, 64k users paying $17.29 is not bad at all. More here.

After months of (or better, years) of discussions about FREE or Micropayments, it's quite possible that the under-dogged Subscription model defended by Rupert Murdoch it's going to prevail. At least on the iPad. Which basically means, if the eReader thing stick and get cheaper, that Murdoch was right after all. Who knew.

Toyota's Swagger Wagon campaign tries to be funny, and delivers

After all the sh*t Toyota has been getting, I think they hit the spot with a series of Ads in a sort of The Office humour style. Can't miss.

Toshiba introduces "Gamble Marketing": Get your money back if England wins the World Cup

Anyone who purchases selected Toshiba products between April 12 and June 10 this year will be able to reclaim the full cost back if England are victorious in South Africa.

It's a gamble, but let's be honest here, England's chances of actually winning are really slim. So Toshiba is mostly likely to get all the attention and sales without having to give a penny back to anybody!