Open secrets
In this context, one of the two more talked-about stories of 2013 in Balduíno started on a quiet October morning after a ‘sound car’ (a car adapted with loudspeakers, normally used for local advertising) announced that Lyn, a 24- year- old mother of two, had died and that her family was inviting the community to her funeral the following day.
When locals use Facebook, they are often more concerned about what is not shown than in what is made explicit, and the same thing is true outside of social media. The broadcast of Lyn’s passing generated uneasiness and curiosity especially because of the lack of information about the cause of death. She had not been killed or involved in an acci-dent, so locals correctly deduced that she died of a health issue. The fact that the family had kept this information secret during the previous months and now avoided revealing the name of the disease prompted people to speculate, gossip and exchange and collect bits and pieces of information gathered informally from family members, work colleagues, neighbours and others who knew her. As in similar cases, though Lyn’s death occupied the settlement’s attention for many days, Facebook postings only mentioned her in terms of goodbye photos and religious messages in relation to her death.69 The issue preoccupying the locals’
attention did not appear on public- facing social media.
Having a very low level of literacy and no professional training, Lyn worked as a money collector on one of the many informal transporta-tion vans used by locals to move to and from nearby settlements. This in itself made her more visible than average, as travellers constantly saw her opening and closing the vehicle’s door to passengers and then collect-ing payment for their journeys. Every day these vans circulate dozens of times along certain defined routes. However, Lyn was also remembered in the settlement or another reason. She has been an attractive girl who had engaged in casual sexual experiences from an early age. Because of this she was by some labelled a ‘piriguete’, a derogatory reference to an (often young) female said to exchange sex for ostentatious fun – for example, at swimming pool parties or exclusive bars.70 Men also describe piriguetes as whores who are paid indirectly for their favours, through the expenditure that is required before they agree to have sex.
Soon after the news of Lyn’s passing began to circulate, locals asso-ciated her death with an event that had happened a few months earlier.
She had suddenly fainted while at work in the van. This information cir-culated and Lyn, who had recently become a more active Facebook user thanks to a camera phone, discreetly referred to it in a short post that
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appears in her timeline, surrounded by many selfies, memes and photos of her children. In response to the gossip circulating about the reasons for her fainting, she wrote in a typical indirect style: ‘People really like to know about other people’s lives. When you want to know anything about me, come and ask me directly. Yes, I’m pregnant and no, it is not of your husband and not of your business. Go wash your dishes.’ But by acknowl-edging the surprising event of being pregnant (leaving others to start to wonder: ‘who might the father be?’), she managed to deflect the public curiosity about the fainting incident.
The most likely cause of Lyn’s death was AIDS. Sexually transmit-ted diseases are spreading silently in the settlement, as a health agent explained to me, citing informally the confidential results of tests car-ried out locally.71 Lyn was probably aware of her illness, as this same pro-fessional explained, because she had given birth ten months earlier and blood tests (for conditions including HIV) are compulsory in public hos-pitals. After having been informed of her condition, Lyn apparently went to a specialised hospital in Salvador to collect the government- subsidised drugs available for HIV patients. However, on seeing others from the settlement queuing to collect the same medicine, she gave up the treat-ment, (supposedly) to avoid being shamed and socially ostracised. Her infection with AIDS was probably the reason why she fainted at work.
Yet, even with this debilitating condition, she managed to keep her secret until the end; it is not clear when her family found out about her illness.
Besides the mere curiosity about the real cause of her death, locals also discussed through face- to- face gossip networks which people Lyn had recently had sexual relationships with, speculating on who might also be contaminated with the disease.
Conclusion
Social media draws a lot of attention from Brazilians of low socioeco-nomic backgrounds. However, the reasons for this interest have been only poorly investigated. Part of the difficulty in accessing these people’s online behaviour relates to how they are under- represented in sectors of society such as journalism, academia and market research. This historically sub-ordinate stratum of society is more often talked about than allowed to speak directly, restricting its ability to reach public spheres beyond the local domain.72 Online user statistics reveal how highly Brazilians are positioned on international rankings in terms of hours spent online.73 The country has the second most active population on social media in
the world, and the third largest population on Facebook.74 Yet these data tend to be analysed and presented in terms of the understanding of social media held by the educated analysts.
Because of the strong class divisions in the country, a foreign corre-spondent with whom I spoke with during the early months of this research mentioned how strangely familiar to him, coming from Europe, was the Facebook communication of the Brazilians he had met, mostly educated, cosmopolitan and from the middle and upper class.75 Their types of con-cerns and their diverse understandings about how the platform should be used seemed the same as the perceptions his Europeans friends had about things such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. There are similarities in what types of content are considered more or less private, what kinds of photos are made available to different groups in each person’s networks and how contacts are structured based on the relationship, for exam-ple close friend, friend, acquaintance, family, etc. Using social media in Balduíno, however, is not like that at all. In the settlement there are differ-ent values, views and sensitivities which, if disregarded, compromise the perception of how the low- income population see and use social media.
So the only way to understand this usage and its appeal is a long- term ethnographic engagement with that particular population.
As the next chapter shows through an analysis of images, people in Balduíno seem at first sight to use Facebook to expose their intimacies and to show off. Locals upload photos of their children, the inside of their homes and scenes from their work places, as well as of family celebra-tions. These posts often show them with motorcycles or cars, wearing fashionable clothing, holding expensive electronic products, consum-ing imported drinks, wearconsum-ing work uniforms (to display their employed status), eating out, working out at the gym or simply holding money.76 In addition, everything they post in public- facing social media can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection; although young people know about content filters,77 they simply choose to ignore them. That is why in the beginning, as I spoke with informants, I constantly expressed my worries about thieves being able to see the expensive equipment they have at home or that paedophiles could target their children. But instead of addressing the issue of privacy78 I was raising, they believed that I was insinuating – as neighbours often do through gossiping and rumours – that they could not be the legitimate owners of the products shown on their social media. Initially therefore, while I was worried that they might get robbed themselves for such inadvertent exposure, they thought that my suggestions echoed the rumours of ‘jealous neighbours’
questioning the origin of their belongings.
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On these first encounters I was tempted to conclude that locals in the settlement lacked the education and knowledge to use social media properly. This explained why they used public- facing social media to show what I regarded as intimate material. Apparently they posted every-thing publicly because they did not know about other more sophisticated uses, and could not really appreciate the consequences of their actions.
But this changed after six months in the field, when I finally gained access to their direct exchanges. At this point I could then see that the ‘intimacy’
appearing on Facebook timelines in Balduíno is very controlled and per-formed. They are not ignorant about privacy, because their truly sensi-tive issues circulate elsewhere.
The sections about speech encryption, indirects and hidden chan-nels of public debate are examples of how much care and attention is given to limit access to information that the locals in Balduíno consider important. As I argue in the first section of this chapter, these traditional modes of behaving include ways of making communication invisible.
Recognising this is the key to understanding the locals’ use of Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms.
Polymedia79 is a helpful conceptual tool for this analysis, as it pro-poses that the understanding of specific platforms – be they Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or WhatsApp – should be considered not in isolation, but in relation to all the other media that are being used. But the case of Balduíno is trickier to interpret using polymedia for at least two rea-sons: firstly because it is tempting for the researcher just to dig into the abundant, ostentatious photographs and other easily accessible informa-tion found on Facebook timelines (as I did during the initial months in the field); and secondly because private communication is protected by social mechanisms and can only be reached through trusted relationships that take many months of the researcher’s presence in the settlement to build. However, to move beyond misleading and often imprecise notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’, we need to observe how these two aspects of their social media contrast and complement each other. The alternative notions of ‘lights on’ and ‘lights off’, analysed further in Chapter 3 through the visual content shared on social media, emerge by comparing the positive display of one’s own life, on the one hand, with the constant attacks and surveillance towards others that happens invisibly on the other. Locals in Balduíno display images showing prosperity, enjoyment and beauty. In less exposed channels they talk about other people’s sex lives or crimes, and share porn, violence and politically incorrect humour.80
But while we might say that public- facing Facebook represents
‘lights on’ and that private- facing WhatsApp represents ‘lights off’, this
chapter reveals a secondary level of complexity in how people apply social media in their daily lives. As the various cases presented show (and contrary to what may seem obvious), public- facing social media can be used as ‘lights off’ and private- facing media is the locality’s true and effective field of collective debate. Above and beyond those possibili-ties we also saw the very popular indirect posting, which has ambiguous qualities of privacy and public- ness. Like dimmer switches that regulate the visibility in a room, indirects bring personal matters to be discussed outside of the protected area of private exchanges, but they do so in a protected manner.
Facebook and WhatsApp are successful in Balduíno because they allow people to relate to each other through these pre- existing norms and values. There were always private and public worlds that were fun-damental both to the socialisation of young people and to the morality of adults. However, these do not correspond simply to conventional mean-ings of private and public. They also relate to a more complex world, which includes the ability to create ‘invisibility’ within what might oth-erwise have seemed the visible. We began by considering the way young people were brought up, within what at first seems a clearly distinct pub-lic area. The place where they were beaten and reprimanded in pubpub-lic view is in opposition to the private arena of the domestic world, and of the peripheral areas of the settlement. But in practice, and for this very reason, people cultivated a way of ‘hiding in the light’ – of using the pub-lic and the visible to create spheres of invisibility within.
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