The mystery of the strength of social networks in Brazil

Acting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shows his cell phone.Eraldo Peres (AP)

From the old Orkut, which revolutionized communications in Brazil and reached even the poorest, to handling the new technologies of today's algorithms, this country has surely been one of the most effervescent since the beginning of the new era. digital.

To such an extent that it has been the social networks that have disrupted even politics and placed Brazil on the brink of an extreme right-wing institutional rupture.

And if it is true that the new type of technological communication has been so profound in this country that it has revolutionized politics, there is little doubt that this phenomenon will continue to be alive, although with a government, like Lula's, at the extremes of the of Bolsonaro.

Future history books will have to explain many things in this field that today is still difficult to understand and illustrate.

Let's start with the phenomenon that appeared, at first glance, out of nowhere, of the former captain without history or content, Jair Bolsonaro and his family with three in-laws. Just four years ago, they were totally unknown and have come to place the country with its government on the brink of an institutional break.

They have poisoned a society with a vocation for happiness, they have returned the ghosts of a new military coup and Solomonically divided the country in two, confronting it on the brink of a civil war.

It is no longer a secret that four years ago the then-unknown former Army captain Jair Bolsonaro came to power thanks to the insight of one of his sons, Carlos, a simple Rio city councilor, apparently with serious mental problems, who had the intuition to use social networks to the fullest and in general in favor of the electoral campaign of his father who badly knew how to use a mobile phone.

Carlos, considered the black sheep of the family due to his presumed mental imbalances, immediately understood a truth that the Brazilians themselves were unaware of: their innate predisposition for communication.

The Brazilian is a society that places its life, its sensations and feelings in the hands of the first one that approaches it.

They are communicative people by nature, they need to tell their lives, expose it to the light of day and they are eager to know the insides of others.

The genius of the new technologies of the Bolsonaro family, seen as emotionally unbalanced, but as a visionary of the new communication networks, immediately understood that his father could only win the elections if he made himself known and loved by the new digital generation .

So it was.

Of this there is no doubt today.

And it happens because in Brazil this taste for communication has made it one of the countries in the world where the great mass of poor, the most economically and culturally disadvantaged classes, have fully entered into the dynamics of the new communication networks.

They may be even semi-literate, but not without a cell phone and without having fun with TikTok.

This long introduction is to ask a somewhat disturbing question about what the new center-left government of former trade unionist Lula da Silva will be able to do, which, contrary to a country devoted to digital, uses little mobile phones and is far from everything. the digital noise that sheltered the Bolsonaro government.

Furthermore, not only Lula personally, but also the hard core of what will be his government, which should be the historical figures of the old Workers' Party (PT), are also thousands of hours away from the effervescence, from the dynamics and the ambiguity of the social networks that dominated the Bolsonaro government.

Perhaps for this reason, the columnist for the newspaper

Pedro Doria has revealed that the new Lula government, aware of the digital strategy deficit that will afflict it compared to what Bolsonaro's was, has decided to "copy the digital laws of Europe".

It's not a bad idea, although it has a downside, and that is that Brazilians are not and do not feel European and they understand the world of communication very differently.

Brazilians are scattered, while Europeans are more collected in our personal world.

I still remember when, after a while here in Brazil, I returned to the central newsroom of the newspaper in Madrid.

Talking with a colleague to whom I explained that here in Brazil, if you sit next to someone waiting for a bus or the subway and you say good morning, it is normal for them to immediately begin to tell you about their life in detail.

They need it.

They are like that.

The Bolsonaro extreme right intuited it through the most conflictive son of the president's family and carried out a campaign based on personal communication through the networks in an almost familiar way, mixing truths with lies.

It did not matter.

If he was on the cell phone, it is because it was true and it was not discussed.

Soon the new Lula government will be in power in this country, in which, despite representing ten parties of different ideologies, I have no doubt that the ministries and the key points of power will be in the hands of the old guards of his party, the PT, just the least accustomed to using the new communication technologies.

It is important that they have begun to become aware of this.

They should not forget, however, that the Bolsonaro clan has not yet died and that it will continue to live, precisely on the networks, which they know how to use like few others to indoctrinate and confuse.

And the networks today, a curious paradox, at least here in Brazil, are also massively in the hands of the millions of poor and even the semi-literate.

They are people who may not know how to write three lines, sometimes because they are ashamed of making mistakes, but they use cell phones like few others to talk, to pass information, true or false, it doesn't matter.

If one day to give force to a piece of news, it was said "it is in the newspaper", today even for the less educated if it is on the networks it is true and full stop.

Furthermore, Bolsonarismo has been able not only to revalue social networks, but also to oppose them to the traditional information media against those who, in these four years, have declared a hard, relentless war, even with insults and acts of violence against them. journalists.

They say that Lula doesn't even have his own cell phone, that when he needs it he uses the others'.

I don't believe it, but if it were true, it would be better for the democracy of this country and to not allow itself to be devoured by a wounded but not dead Bolsonarismo that they give him one, the most modern and that's it.

And this because digital Bolsonarism will continue to be alive and kicking on the networks and diving into the murky waters of the faknews of which Bolsonarism is not only a master, but even a genius.