Finding a middle ground
In Balduíno social media mostly helped teenagers rather than the par-ents who tried to control them. Teenage pregnancies are not uncommon even in evangelical Christian families, but I have also seen examples of social media becoming a tool for evangelical teens and young adults seeking to maintain a middle ground; they have to navigate between control from their families and churches and the local peer pressure to engage in premarital sexual relationships. Through social media these evangelical Christians could build a sense of identity together, drawing on elements of the faith they embraced, but also modernising and updating their beliefs to move beyond the stereotype of religious fanatic.
One group that I followed consists of young adult females from the local Assembly of God church. They grew up together, and now keep in touch and support each other during the intense years as university students. Together they resist the pressure from the church’s minister, who insists that evangelical Christian women should dress respectfully and modestly, for example by wearing skirts, never trou-sers. However, the young women ignore him in this matter, as wear-ing only skirts at university reinforced the prejudices of other students that evangelical Christians are close- minded, backward and subservi-ent to archaic values. During weekdays, Facebook and WhatsApp is key for these women; they remain in continuous communication as they follow individual but equally intense schedules, including long daily bus trips to and from the city. Through this communication, and when meeting for Sunday activities, they also closed ranks against the min-ister’s desire to invigilate people’s social media. The women say the minister is wrong to publicly shame teenagers from the church during services because of things he finds on their Facebook timelines – gener-ally girls and young women posting photos wearing ‘less respectful and modest’ clothing.
In short, this group of young adults used social media chat and also Facebook timelines to present themselves – both to con-servative adults from their church and to their ‘more liberated’, non- evangelical peers elsewhere – as achievers who are progressing in life, have interesting careers and futures ahead, are acquiring sophis-ticated training and knowledge at their university courses and have loyal and supportive boyfriends whom they plan to marry when the right time comes.
Conclusion
The sections of this chapter about intimacy and social media refer pri-marily to cases related to teenagers. However, as the ethnographic evi-dence suggests, the online social relations of teenagers and young adults generally differ from adults (in relation, for instance, to infidelity) only because of the time they have available to use social media and their subsequent level of experience. Their online presence reproduces experi-ences that previously took place in the context of face- to- face exchanges.
The apparent modernity of social media can make it difficult to see the effects online communication has on local social relations. At first we might be tempted to see the novelties of computers and the internet being quickly adopted and incorporated into the daily routines of these low- income Brazilians. However, the everyday use of social media in Balduíno shows similar results to the ethnography Fonseca produced during the 1980s and 1990s, discussed in the early sections of this chap-ter. In my Bahian field site, the presence of government services has expanded noticeably in the past few decades in terms of health services, schooling and police, among others. However, support networks are still intrinsic to living there; social media has been incorporated often not as a driver of change but rather as a means to reproduce the possibilities for creating and cultivating alliances.
As the initial sections of this chapter also indicate, locals bring to social media the values that their community has traditionally held for many years. The way in which teenagers ‘friend’ people from out-side Balduíno follows a similar pattern to a local form of relationships offline. These online ‘friends’ are just like the people in the settlement whom they ‘know by sight’. But as social media users move to ‘friend-ing’ inside the settlement, a conflict develops between tradition and new technologies. Locals try to establish new connections indepen-dently of face- to- face networks of relationships, and yet these new relationships tend not to evolve. The desire to meet this other person known only ‘by sight’ is insufficient to challenge the fear of greeting a person who might not greet back. The actual relationships that pros-per online are often those of previously existing networks, established through face- to- face interactions in the neighbourhood, at work, at school or at church. Once these face- to- face relationships exist, online becomes yet another medium for the person to create and nurture his or her position within networks of mutual help that expand beyond direct family bonds.
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The middle part of this chapter focuses on romance and infidel-ity, showing the sophisticated and creative use of social media when it comes to cheating on one’s partner or to reducing the possibilities for being cheated on. No topic is more closely related to conversations about social media locally – particularly among men – than the many ways in which these platforms help with flirting and also spying on others. Sometimes couples agree to exchange their social media pass-words as a sign of trust, so that each one can see to whom the other is speaking and the conversations they have, but the outcomes of these experiments are not considered entirely satisfactory. Traditionally in the region both men and women tend to have several partners (some-times simultaneously) during their lives. Social media does nothing to make people more faithful to their relationships. If anything, it makes them more excited about the possibilities of having secret lovers, and also more stressed as a consequence of the expected acts of spying and social control.
From the perspective of affluent, middle- class values, it is often tempting to classify relationships outside the nuclear family as problem-atic or less structured, possibly the result of ‘corrupted’ family morals or practices driven by their inferior socioeconomic situation.58 However, the way that locals in Balduíno use social media today suggests that at least part of the population, both men and women, want to keep the possibil-ity of having more than one relationship during their lives. With regard to this subject, therefore, we conclude that social media is popular for chan-nelling many people’s choices to retain established norms and practices concerning romance.
The final sections, in which we explore parent– child relations, show that there is a lot going on between generations through social media. In the region, low- income women have historically been in charge of the family house and of their children. They now face a difficult deci-sion in relation to raising and protecting their children. The settlement is a volatile place for teenagers to live these days, as drug dealing and other forms of crime provide access to new and more exciting possibili-ties of consumption. Traditional forms of entertainment such as going to the river or the beach are not as safe as they once were, nor as enchant-ing as modern alternatives such as goenchant-ing to the gym, havenchant-ing an ice cream at the fancy fast- food joint, going to the mall or playing video games. To try to offer some of these opportunities while keeping one’s child out of danger (often without support from his or her father), these mothers often work formally outside of the settlement, leaving their children on
their own for some hours of the day. The arrival of WhatsApp means that such women can quickly send and receive text and audio messages to and from the children, and attempt to monitor their whereabouts. In the following chapter we further examine the accumulation of their roles as both mothers and formal employees who spend most of their days away from the house.
Even if their mothers now have smartphones to keep in touch with their children, however, the latter are not easily giving up their tradi-tional freedoms. The relatively peripheral areas of the settlement have long been used by teenagers to meet up away from the control of adult authority. The issue here has different, and complex, layers: teenage pregnancy is not the consequence of a new means of communication, nor is it responsible for locals using it to flirt and to spy on each other. As the book has shown so far, the changes taking place in the settlement relate mainly to the possibilities of having formal employment and the radical increase in the presence of evangelical churches.
Parents who belong to evangelical organisations are making greater efforts to promote a structure of family very different from local tradi-tions. In this ideal, the same two people meet and stay together, are faith-ful to one another and have less distinct roles: both should study, have careers and contribute to caring for children and household expenses.
However, in general evangelical parents (especially when mothers are also working outside of the settlement) struggle to control their offspring and impose these strict values; today’s teenagers will always know more about social media than adults and can circumvent attempts at moni-toring. And yet, as the last case shows, social media is also becoming a space in which these evangelical teenagers can craft identities that retain certain aspects of their faiths, such as avoiding drinking and premarital sex, while at the same time presenting themselves as modern in terms of aspiration for, and access to, education and careers. Viewed from this perspective, religious beliefs do not make them appear backward: they make them seem advanced and proud.
This chapter has mainly shown how social media has not signifi-cantly changed personal social relations in Balduíno. The way in which people use social media is broadly informed by forms of sociality that derive from face- to- face interaction; these follow norms that regulate relationships in families and inside broader networks of support and help. Social media is popular largely because it provides opportunities for people to embrace external processes of change and modernisation while retaining many traditional social values. However, social media is not just
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being widely used; it brings the chance to employ alternative channels to communicate and form alliances, and also poses new situations of con-flict. The argument is that the people of Balduíno are using technology to be more like themselves. Yet technology is not a ‘neutral agent’: even as locals use social media, they are also reshaping social relationships and values.