It is a great pleasure to present Wi: Journal of Mobile Media’s third issue. What differentiates it from previous issues is its focus on a single country, namely, Brazil. More importantly, with views, cases and theoretical discussions made by Brazilian researchers and artists.

To have the Brazilian mobile media scenario presented by Brazilian authors is unique because it brings to light a Latin American perspective which would otherwise remain hidden for the vast majority of the English speaking audience. Furthermore, this issue is evidence of how Wi’s network is expanding its diversity and dialogue.

Brazil, as Eduardo Pellanda’s piece shows, is full of paradoxes. The country has a significant local market, but also one of the most expensive price basket of telecommunications services (fixed telephony, mobile telephony and broadband). Under such conditions, recent official figures indicate the existence of almost 158 million mobile phone subscriptions, but only 20% of urban homes with Internet access (CETIC.BR, 2009; ITU, 2009). Other local challenges are also faced in this issue with special attention to surveillance matters (Fernanda Bruno), spectrum management policies (Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira) and municipal wireless networks (Fabio B. Josgrilberg).

Despite local economic, political and technological challenges, mobile media in Brazil is also a fruitful ground for innovative projects. The possibilities of locative media is explored by André Lemos and Lucas Bambozzi. Gilson Schwartz presents how mobile media is helping to reinvent social relations in São Paulo’s traffic. In his article, Fernando Firmino da Silva discusses how mobile media is changing Brazilian journalism. Finally, we have Lucia Santaella’s piece, shedding light on some possible theoretical developments being brought about by the emergence of mobile media.

We would like to thank Wi’s staff for all the editorial support, especially Kim Sawchuk, who first imagined this special edition. Looking forward to keep the dialogue going and we wish you all a good reading.

Special thanks to Tamara Shepherd for her assistance on the English language editing, copyediting and formatting for this issue.

André Lemos
Fabio B. Josgrilberg
Guest Editors

References

CETIC.BR. (2009). TIC domicílios e usuários 2008. Brasília: Centro de Estudos sobre as Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação.

ITU. (2009). Measuring the Information Society. New York: International Telecommunications Union.

Cell phones are one of the icons of the post-modern age because they represent many possibilities converged in one single device. They connect people, and at the same time, they are used more generally to organize life through textual, audio and video platforms:

… as soon as the cellphone began hooking into the Internet or offering some of its features—books, newspapers, magazines, live and delayed conversation in text, telephone, videophone, radio, music recordings, photographs, television—the cellphone became a home away from home for communications, a mobile home or pocket hearth, a traveling medium of media. (Levinson, 2004, p.53).

The subject of mobile communications has been increasing in complexity since mobile technology’s rapid penetration of different cultures and social classes. Countries like Brazil have felt a strong impact from mobile communication across many different social sectors. By increasing overall interactions, mobile devices have resulted in various opportunities and challenges for changing social habits and the division of public and personal spaces. The always-on voice and data connection has given rise to a new dimension of content distribution, co-presence and communications services. If the personal computer already served to empower individuals, mobile devices can be said to empower the “hyperpersonal” because they are typically used by one person, all the time. As these devices begin to offer increased functionality, they start to become more like computers; from this perspective, mobile technology has a huge impact due to its affordability and its status as ubiquitous computing.

It is not only the cell phone that represents this new mobile experience, but it is also many other forms of mobile PC—like UMPC (Ultra Mobile Personal Computer) and MID (Mobile Internet Device)—which are emerging and entering the market in a similar manner as the Smartphones and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Other regular household objects such as home stereos, TV, radios, and refrigerators are also becoming wireless-capable and giving rise to new communication possibilities. Moreover, computer technology itself has become more prevalent in Brazil: last year, notebook sales increased 108% from the previous year;¹ the total number was 3.2 million units.

If all these assumptions about the proliferation of mobile communications are applied to a country like Brazil, the phenomenon becomes even more interesting. A nation covering 3,287,597 square miles with a population of 189,987,291 inhabitants² comprises a challenging context for developing communications systems. As such, wireless services have been commonly used throughout Brazil´s history. The country was one of the first to adopt both radio and television; in fact, Father Roberto Landell de Moura transmitted a wireless signal around the same time that Guglielmo Marconi did.³

Brazil’s extreme differences—with part of the population living in marginalized conditions, while the country offers one of the largest global markets for technology—make it a unique context for studying the adoption of digital culture. The nation is a leader in electronic voting, and in some rural areas, ballot data is transmitted by satellite phones. Also, the country is a pioneer in processing income tax returns on the Internet. The Brazilian population spends more time online than any other population in the world,⁴ and is a major part of online communities like Google’s Orkut. This social networking platform, popular with Brazilian teenagers and young adults, enables users to build profiles with personal information and to exchange messages (scraps). Also, it is interesting to note that the sales of personal computers outpaced those of TV sets for the first time in 2007,⁵ while web advertising outpaced advertising on cable TV.

In the mobile phone context, Brazil has 140 million active users and 81% of this figure represents pre-paid plans.⁶ This modality of payment is one of the greatest factors for the popularity of wireless communications in the country. It is a more expensive service in terms of minutes and data units in comparison with post-paid plans, but it gives users the flexibility to pay on demand under certain conditions. Another key characteristic of this plan is that it allows the owner of the phone to receive calls even if there are no credits remaining. This allows people to be in touch even when they cannot pay for the service.

In this context, the use of mobile communication has transformed many daily social and economic activities. Street vendors, such as hot dog kiosks, can sell their product by phone and provide home delivery. Freelancers across many different occupations can stay on the road during the day, rather than waiting for a client’s call. Some jobs were near impossible to conduct without this mobile potential. And, in Brazil especially, informal jobs are a relevant part of the economy; nearly 45% of all jobs in the country are in this category.⁷ These kinds of workers are typically part of commercial and services areas, and yet they don’t pay taxes and don’t have any formal business with corporations.

Other aspects of this digital inclusion do not directly result from mobility, but are allowed by it. A majority of the population did not even have landline telephones in their houses before the advent of cell phones. One of the reasons for this is the difficulty of access in some high-density areas where houses cannot be easily or affordably connected by the telephone company network. Mobile phones sidestep this problem because the only infrastructure needed for an entire region is a wireless station. These resolve the last mile problem,⁸ which usually stems from the prohibitive cost of an infrastructure project. Normally, it is not difficult to send a cable to a determined region, but distributing this network to a large number of residents requires tremendous effort. This is one of the major benefits of the wireless model, for not only does it create mobility, but it also makes any network expandable and flexible. While this situation is mainly related to the countryside, many big cities still have problems with area coverage.

With this capability in mind, the city of Porto Alegre uses Wi-Fi in some poor areas to allow the population to use the Internet free of charge. This enables schools, small businesses and residences to be connected at all times, empowering the population to be included into the same access bracket as the country’s upper social classes. This model has also been adopted in many other cities across the nation. In Rio de Janeiro, the city is using Wi-Fi in many spots to improve tourist connections and relations. In Amazon, the WiMax⁹ technology has been tested to provide Internet access in remote locations, helping communications in “physically” distant places.

The third generation (3G) of wireless communications had a massive launch in Brazil in 2008; the introduction of 3G is extremely important because it delivers wireless broadband connectivity. All service providers in major cities of the country now have the technology and, according to an agreement with the governmental agency (ANATEL), the 3G technology will cover the entire country within a 5-year period. This could also contribute to digital inclusion in many places that still do not have broadband connections. In the largest cities of the country, the 3G network already offers an alternative mode of accessing the Internet in regions that are not economically viable enough for companies to establish traditional broadband connections. For instance, in the first six months of the traditional broadband service, the companies would not have enough USB modems (which allow laptops to be connected) in stock.

The virtual space of communication that flows through the Internet’s architecture is an environment that cannot be measured and understood with the same symbols that are used to represent actual spaces:

Wherever I currently happen to find myself, I can now discover many of the same channels on a nearby television. I can access the same bank account, and I can chat with the same people on my cell phone. I can download my email and send replies almost completely independently of location. And my online world, which once consisted of ephemeral and disconnected fragments, has become increasingly persistent, interconnected, and unified… (Mitchell, 2003, p. 17).

But people are already interconnecting with the help of mobile phones and other portable devices that take advantage of many different wireless networks covering small and large areas. The massive use of these devices is transforming persons into cyborgs and cities into information territories (Mitchell, 2003).

Brazil’s case is unique because it shares some of the characteristics of African regions that did not have landline telephones and jumped directly to wireless systems; but at the same time, in most of Brazil’s urban areas, there is a level of technological development similar to that of wealthier countries. The 140 million Brazilian users are rapidly transitioning from simple social uses for the technology to complex services like mobile Internet surfing. Of course, this virtuality mirrors actual space (Lévy, 1996), with technological empowerment giving rise to new dimensions of crime and privacy abuses. But this path of social development proves to be shaping its own way towards maturation in the digital era. In the past, radio and television had a leading role in integrating a nation with continental variability like Brazil. However, mobile communications have the potential to establish themselves as even more relevant in terms of social impact.

Notes

1. IDC: www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/informatica/ult124u544054.shtml

2. www.ibge.gov.br/english/

3.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura

4. IBOPE/NetRatings

5. Sales figures show that around 10 million PCs were sold, versus 9 million TV units. Abinee: www.abinee.org.br/ing/

6. www.anatel.gov.br

7. www.ipea.gov.br

8. The “last mile” is the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer. Usually referred to by the telecommunications and cable television industries. (source Wikipedia)

9. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access - www.wimaxforum.org

References

Caron, A. H., & Caronia, L. (2007). Moving Cultures - Mobile Communication in Everyday Life. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Casalegno, F. (2006). MEMORIA COTIDIANA. Porto Alegre: Sulina.

Castells, M., Fernández-Ardèvol, M., Qiu, J. L., & Sey, A. (2007). Mobile Communication and Society - A Global Perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Dertouzos, M. (2001). The Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper Collins.

Gillmor, D. (2004). We the Media – Grassroots by the people, for the people. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media.

Lévy, P. (1996). O que é o Virtual. São Paulo: Editora 34.

Levinson, P. (2004). Cellphone. New York: Palgrave.

Mitchell, W. J. (2003). ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Boston: MIT Press.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Vida Digital. São Paulo, SP: Companhia das Letras.

Rheingold, H. (2003). Smart Mobs. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing.

Turkle, S. (1995). A Vida no Ecrâ - A indentidade na era da Internet. Lisboa: Relógio D´água Editores.

Biography

Eduardo Campos Pellanda, PhD is professor and researcher at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Brazil. He was also Visiting Scholar at MIT, Mobile Experience Lab in 2008.

“The internet has already started leaking into the real world”
Ben Russel (1999)

Cyberspace Downloaded

Paradoxically, mobility media are localization media. It is interesting to note that locative media, which emphasize places, are furnished by mobility technologies that combine devices (laptops, smart phones, PDA and GPS) and RFID sensors, ensuring connectivity using wireless digital networks (Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, 3G and Bluetooth). Moving is “dis-locating”—but not in the sense of erasing the existing place, rather it opens a possibility for creating a new sense of place through social practices such as urban annotations, location-based games, political mobilization, mapping and geo-tags. If mobility was a problem in the “upload era” (having to leave the workplace or home, and to deal with incompatible equipment and networks in conjunction with a lack of localization services), then today, in the “download era” of locative media, mobility has become an opportunity for appropriating public space (Dourish et al., 2007). Apart from its physical and symbolic characteristics, place gains an informational layer as an electronic database, and it should be thought of in its social, cultural and imaginary, but also informational, dimension.

The discussion on spatiality and media is not new, and the social production of space by mass (telegraph, newspapers, radio and TV) and interpersonal media (mail and telephone) are well known. Mass media shapes a perception of space and our subjectivity, showing our place in the world (in relation to others around the world), our identity (in relation to other identities), in addition to organizing the spatial arrangement of societies, cities and institutions. Seen in this way, place should be understood as flow and event (Thrift, 1999; Massey, 1997; Shields, 1991), which cross territorialities that are always open to social and communicational arrangements.

New media produces new spatiality. At its core, cyberculture brings about questions of space; many assert that it is a cyber-space culture. Since the Internet’s appearance, discussion has circulated around ideas of virtual space, virtual communities, virtualizing institutions, web art, e-learning, e-commerce, e-government, etc. The emphasis here is on the “upload”, understood as an electronic transposition of bodies, institutions and information to a “place” outside of the “real world”: cyberspace. Now, with the Internet “dripping onto things”, downloading shows an emphasis on “localization”, on information connected to the “real world”, to concrete spatial relationships, to things and objects and public and private places. A “cyberspace download” creates synergies and constitutes new territorialities “in the real world”. The global expansion of location-based services (LBS) and location-based technologies (LBT) creates possibilities for reconfiguring experiences in public space. Place is no longer a problem of accessing and exchanging information in cyberspace “up there”, but an opportunity to see things “down here”.

Locative Media, Mobility and Senses of Localization.

We can define locative media as devices, sensors and wireless digital networks, allied to communication processes, which allow for physical and informational mobility (Kellerman, 2006)—they are “context-aware”. Moreover, “locative media” is an expression created by artists to differentiate their work from commercial projects involving location-based technologies and services (Karimi and Hammad, 2004). Artists created the term—first proposed by Karlis Kalnins in 2003 (see also Russel, 1999; Benford, 2003, 2005; Chang and Goodman, 2006; Pope, 2005)—to show the ambiguities in emerging concepts such as mobility, location, localization, public space, communicability, surveillance and privacy. With LBS and LBT, a new informational territorialization of places occurs, broadening its functions and heterotopias (Foucault, 1984) through new relationships between the “real world”, databases and electronic devices. Companies and governments use these technologies to locate users, propose location-services, track movements, etc. Artists use them for the same purposes, but they overturn the logic of control, producing aesthetic and political tensions.

I propose a typology for locative media projects comprising five categories: 1) Electronic urban annotations; 2) Mapping and geo-localization; 3) Mobile social networking; 4) Pervasive computational games; and 5) Smart mobs. In all these categories we can find location-based technologies and services creating new meanings of space, through the use of the new territories’ bond to places. The informational territory can help us to create new perspectives on the dynamic between place, mobility, and community.

Electronic Urban Annotations are situated in urban space, and use mobile devices and wireless networks to generate invisible writing (Yellow Arrow, Sonic City, MurMur, Node Explore). Electronic annotations offer new ways to “write” the urban space with mobile devices. Physical annotations, like posters, stickers or graffiti are current practices in big cities (as forms of what I call “analogical locative media”). The introduction of “electronic” locative media allows for new ways of producing invisible annotations, using the power of mobile technologies and networks to index data to a location. Projects in “Mobile Augmented Reality Applications” (MARA) also work through a mode of annotation that explicitly interpolates informational and physical layers in the real world, thus “augmenting it”. Here, representations of the real world have been embedded and contextualized with electronic information, enabling interactions both in real and virtual spaces. These electronic annotation projects evidence new forms of producing content about places, representing the informational layer of the new informational territory. Here we can see how temporary uses of place, in the production and consumption of locative data in informational territories, creates new senses of places, new forms of appropriation and new processes of de/re-territorialization and mobility (physical and virtual) in contemporary cyberculture.

Mapping and Geo-Localization are locative functions applied to mapping and tracking movements in urban space, attaching information (photos, text, video and sound) to maps. In the photo-sharing platform Flickr, for example, users add geo-tags to electronic maps. This system enables the sharing of tags through the location of places worldwide. These experiences promote new ways of producing maps, creating new forms of discourse about urban space. Mapping with digital devices offers new tools for reinforcing communities, involving the appropriation of places and new territorialities. Mapping, tags and localization can be seen as a new way of creating meaningful experiences in the actual cities.

Mobile Social Networking uses locative media to find people and to organize meetings and/or the exchange of information (Imity, Dodgeball, Citysense). Communities too are building bottom-up maps that represent themselves, using applications like Neighbornode and Peuplade. Mobile social networking is a form of locative media that helps people locate the position of a friend in a urban space, facilitating face-to-face meetings; it is quite the opposite of virtual community, since people find and meet each other in real life. Another example of such a project is Google Latitude, which can be used with almost any cell phone, enabling the user to control the level of his/her own visibility. Hence, the system of mobile social networking uses the new informational territorialization and mobile devices and networking to arrange meetings and reinforce sociability.

Pervasive Computational Games—also known as Location-Based Mobile Games—are online games that use a mobile device with locative capabilities in urban space (Geocaching, Uncle Roy All Around You, Can You See Me Now, Pac-Manhattan, mScape ). For example, the popular Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a GPS to play hide-and-seek with containers anywhere in the world. (There are 480,000 geo-caches registered in over 100 countries.) Uncle Roy All Around You, from British group Blast Theory, uses palms, cell phones and Internet networks that enable users to play on the streets in an attempt to find “Uncle Roy” within 60 minutes. Street players can see online players exploring this same area of the city on the map on their handheld computer, similar to the game Pac-Manhattan, which is the street version of the original Pac-man game that coordinates actions through mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks. These games offer new experiences that merge game and augmented reality, as in the example of mScape from HP. Here again, by way of the ludic dimension, the city becomes a playground, reminiscent of eras past. The play dimension of locative media helps to create new forms of appropriation of the urban space, new kinds of communities and, as in the projects discussed below, new senses of place and territorialization.

Smart Mobs (Rheingold, 2003) are political and/or aesthetic (Flash Mobs) mobilizations coordinated by mobile devices that bring people together to perform an action in public space and then to disperse rapidly. These actions orchestrate people in public spaces, and use location capabilities to spread information. Artistic purposes of these mobilizations, such as a performance, can be differentiated from political-activist imperatives. Howard Rheingold (2006) calls this latter group of practices “Smart Mobs”.

The former, hedonistic type of gathering are the “Flash Mobs”—apolitical, lightning-demonstrations where people choose, via networks (blogs, mobile phones), a public place for swarming and dispersing, for the purpose of causing perplexity and astonishment in passersby. Flash Mobs began in New York and have spread throughout the world. Cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Budapest, Chicago, London, Melbourne, Oslo, Rome, San Francisco and Zurich have already experienced this new practice. In Brazil, Flash Mobs have been organized in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador, among other cities. By contrast, political Smart Mobs try to mobilize crowds for the purpose of political protest. Significant examples here include the political demonstrations in the Philippines against President Estrada, and in Madrid after the terrorist attack on the trains in 2004, which brought people together through SMS. In 2005, Smart Mobs took place during the civil riots in France. The Brazilian press has covered a variety of Smart Mobs, such as: the PCC actions in São Paulo (the criminal organization has plotted attacks all over the city); the student protests against Microsoft in Chile in 2006 and 2007; the protests against the expansion of maglev tracks in Shanghai in 2007; the attempts to build a network as a help line for activism in the Philippines; the demonstrations against President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan; and the promotion of women’s rights in Uganda. Smart (and Flash) Mobs create forms of mobilization through mobile technologies, attesting to the way that temporary uses of spaces, physical and informational mobilities and swarming actions can determine new uses of places and territories. In addition, they can reinforce both old and new communities and their attendant aesthetic and political uses of the city.

New Informational Territories.

The idea of the cyberspace download coincides with similar concepts that address the new dimensions of place made possible with LBS and LBT: some authors speak of a hybrid space, personal digital territory (Beslay & Hakala, 2005), virtual wall and digital footprints (Kapadia, et al., 2007), interstitial space (Santaella, 2008), hybrid reality or cellspace (Manovich, 2005). All of these images point to a fusion between electronic and physical space. However, to understand the new ontology of places in the era of the Internet of things, I propose the concept of informational territory—understood as the synergistic interactions between the informational layer and the other dimensions of a place. The hypothesis is that information society creates new zones of informational control, new territorializations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) and new functions of places in the “real world”.

Territoriality is a cultural artefact that shapes social relations and our relationship with the material and symbolic world (Lyman, 1967; Gottmann, 1973; Sack, 1986; Delaney, 2005). We are always immersed in territorial layers (subjectivity, physicality, culture, politics, economics, etc.), and these layers constitute places. Every place is composed of lines of escape, movements, flows and tensions between territories (Thrift, 1999; Cresswell, 2004). To these territorializations (of control), a contemporary informational layer is added. For example, the well-known beach in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro now has a Wi-Fi zone. Locals and tourists can access the network while laying on the sand. Another informational layer, a digital one, is now superimposed onto this place. Yet the “paradise” of a wireless connection gets circumscribed by the intrinsic characteristics of the place, and users are forced to deal with them (e.g. rules, codes and insecurity). By accessing the Internet through that network, users occupy an area of informational control within other territorialities. The informational territory, bonded to a physical territory, adds a new function to this place. Space is constituted by such places that exist inside territories in an endless process of mutual determination, which is horizontal and vertical (inside each category and among them). Today we have to take into account a new form of territory in contemporary societies: the digital, informational one. Indeed, every territory is a place of social control and borders, of informational exercises in surveillance and violence.

For informational territories (Lemos, 2008, 2008a), the exercise of control (and the act of being controlled) relies upon digital information flow in a physical area. It is a new territory within existing places, created by the intersection between urban space and cyberspace. We must understand that in general, places result from negotiations among territories; today, new senses of places emerge from these new informational layers of territories. By informational, I mean digital, electronic informational flow. And although all territory is made by information, informational territory serves to isolate digital information layers from other forms of “information”. Digital information layers are the key components that create informational territories within places. I would like to emphasize how new forms of access and control—furnished by mobile devices and wireless networks—proliferate in the physical places of informational territories. As such, these developments do not mark the end of places, the no sense of places, or a no place (Virilio, 1984; Meyrowitz, 1985; Augé, 1995), but they offer new senses of places, territories, mobility and community.

The informational territory is not cyberspace, but the territory in a place formed by the relationship between its physical dimensions and electronic flows. For example, a Wi-Fi network in a public park creates an informational territory—people that have informational power can log onto the Internet to receive, produce and distribute information—that must be taken into account in thinking about that place. This layer is in relationship with others (laws, regulations, subjectivities, etc.) that constitute a “new sense” of the place “park”. It is not the end of the park, but a new signification. By accessing the Internet through these networks and devices, the user is in an area of informational control within other territorialities. This means that he/she can control what to receive and what to produce, but must also negotiate other forms of power and control (other territories). The informational territory is bound to a physical territory (political, legal, cultural, imaginary, etc.), but it transforms, by the means of electronic data (through rules, codes of access and speed), the function of this place. It creates a new heterotopy (Foucault, 1984), as we’ll see later. The informational territory changes the place, since all places are dependent on the synergy between imaginary, subjective, corporeal, technological and legal territories.

Interesting artistic experiences can help us to “see” these informational territories. Think about the work of Hasan Elahi, an academic and artist who developed a system of self-surveillance. Elahi tracks his every move with GPS data and posts this on his website. He began the experience after being questioned by the FBI in 2002 (accused of storing explosives in Florida). After the investigation, it was proved that he was innocent. Now, he controls all information about himself. Here we can see, by self-surveillance, an attempt to control his informational personal territory. Another example comes from the work of artist Susan Härtig, “Disconnected”, where she tries to show how wireless networks (the electromagnetic spectrum) are creating and expanding informational territories. We are always, whether we are aware of it or not, immersed in that spectrum—her artwork demonstrates this through its opposite, by blocking access and disconnecting people. The artist builds a tent that insulates the user, preventing access to the electromagnetic cloud. Here, the “territory-tent” blocks the “informational territory”. The tent is also seen as a nomadic architecture, but in reality, though it is mobile, it creates a striate space, an area of territory in the midst of the deterritorializated flow (Deleuze, 1980). These examples from art installations show the complexities in issues of place and territory. With a better understanding of locative media and informational territories, we can now look at the Brazilian situation in more detail.

The Mobility Culture in Brazil

LBS, LBT and informational territories are expanding in Brazil. However, the debate about locative media remains ongoing and the country suffers from serious social challenges (including the digital divide). As indicated from data published by Anatel (the National Telecommunications Agency) in August 2008, we currently have 138.4 million mobile phones in a density of 72.09 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, with 80% of these being pre-paid, showing little capacity for personal investment in new services. 3G networks are growing in the country and studies show that mobile Internet already exceeds developed standards. Access via mobile devices has already arrived at 9% of the 8.1 million broadband users (versus 6% in the US). Aceenture research shows that Brazil is in second place among countries with the most interest in mobility, faring better than countries such as France, the US, Italy, Great Britain, Spain and Germany, and losing out only to Mexico. There are 950,000 Internet connections via a 3G network with mini-modems, representing 10% of all connection types. This has all been established in a very short space of time.¹ Wireless networks, such as Wi-Fi and Wi-Max, are also expanding. According to the Ministry of Communications, 30 Brazilian cities have introduced or are in the process of implementing network projects. The National Digital Cities Plan wants to take broadband to the whole country and to consolidate digital inclusion actions (including technologies and wireless networks). The objective is to establish 160 Digital Cities around the country.

Corporate uses of LBS and LBT in Brazil include: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth areas; Wi-Fi marketing (shows, fairs, exhibitions and hotels); pervasive games allied with marketing (such as “Petrobrás Mobile Racing”); and localization services such as “Vivo Localiza” (which offers approximate localization of friends and families), “Vivo Co-piloto” (which outlines routes like a car’s GPS navigation system) and “Mapas & Rotas” from Nextel. There is vigorous development of GPS for localization (on board cars) and in 3G mobile phones (which today count 500,000 users in Brazil²), as well as GIS and QR Code (at São Paulo car show in 2008, for example). RFID use at tollbooths and on car number plates is growing, alongside an increased number of public and private security cameras (CCTV). With regards to RFID labels, the Brazilian government has been implementing a chip in car number plates since 2007 (starting in São Paulo) and has coverage of the whole country as its goal.³ As such, LBS should grow significantly in Brazil in 2009.

However, beyond commercial and corporate uses, there are few examples that show how these technologies have been deployed in the consideration of political and aesthetic questions. The role of artists and activists is fundamental for drawing attention to the potentialities and dangers of locative media. It should be emphasized that some festivals do encourage debate and understanding regarding the challenges of mobility culture in Brazil. The two most important are MobileFest and Arte.Mov; two others are Motomix and Nokia Trends.

Seeking a Meaning for Locative Media in Brazil – Locative Art

I recently visited the street market on Ave. Afonso Pena in Belo Horizonte, Brazil during the Arte.Mov festival in November 2008. The avenue was transformed by the market, which created a temporary heterotopia. Here, place became flow, built into trans-historical memory and social sense. A locative media avant la lettre caught my attention while I was walking around the market; it produced spatialization that served to mediate relationships, order space, produce mass communication, and give information about services and problems within the place. This non-digital locative media was local radio (called “radio-poste” in Brazil, meaning radio that broadcasts only at that place, with speakers attached to street poles), which spread news about urban equipment, lost documents, security problems, etc., in real time.

In another paper (Lemos, 2008, 2008a), I have shown the characteristics of non-digital locative media; here I would like to reinforce their difference from those of digital locative media. The radio spreads mass information, but does not react with visitors in a direct form and does not produce, spread or store information in a digital database. There is no informational territorialization to speak of. With proximal mobile phones, sensors, wireless networks and their databases, however, information would be disseminated in an “intelligent” form, in accordance with the citizen’s localization. For example, a transmission via Bluetooth would welcome visitors, showing the market’s history using video/photos (“Bluetooth broadcast”). A map would show the user’s exact position and what options he/she has in the market’s different sections (“mapping and geo-localization”), as well as stall and urban equipment localization. Information regarding lost documents could be sent via Bluetooth or SMS. Visitors could find acquaintances or exchange information with a “mobile social networking” system. They could also write electronically on certain locations in the market, sharing their impressions (“electronic urban annotations”).

Street Market in Ave. Afonso Pena, Belo Horizonte

This example shows some of the projects in a hypothetical use of this place in Brazil. The market is a real place, with territorialities and an established temporary use of space. By being a place ingrained with the city’s memory, it could be an interesting exercise to use it as a backdrop for art and locative media experiences.

With reference to Mapping and Geo-localization, we can cite five pieces of work: two artistic and three more concerned with content production. The first two are the Motoboy and Sticker Maps and the other three are Wikicrimes, Citix and Wi-Fi Salvador. Zexe’s Motoboy project in 2007 could very well be adapted to a central neighborhood around the market. In São Paulo, Motoboys go through the city’s public spaces with mobile phones and take photographs, make videos and divulge their impressions in real time. Combining physical and informational mobility, they use their locative power to make sense of their journeys and to register visual commentaries of their daily lives. We can imagine street sellers circulating through the place, registering happenings and creating their own stories about the market.

Picture from Motoboys in São Paulo

Sticker Map is a project by Catholic University students in São Paulo (PUC-SP), that uses wireless networks, mapping and QR Codes to highlight stickers in the city’s streets, making visible things that only watchful eyes would catch in the streets of Brazil’s largest metropolis. Photographic mapping was carried out on Ave. Paulista during the months of August, September and October 2008 with Nokia N95 phones and using Wi-Fi or 3G networks to upload in real time with GPS coordinates. QR codes were then placed that led to the map. This type of action could also be done in the market region, registering urban graffiti and stickers, adding another element to the production of a sense of the place.

Sticker Map Project in São Paulo/Brazil from sticker map on Vimeo.

Sticker Maps

WikiCrimes and Citix map crimes in Brazilian regions. Citix has the city of Recife as a base, allowing users to also add comments on places in the city. The project works in partnership with the Federal Public Prosecution Service and was developed at the Studies and Advanced Systems Centre (C.E.S.A.R). WikiCrimes has the same objective but it covers the whole national territory. A similar mapping project, Wi-Fi Salvador, is a map of Wi-Fi hotspots in Salvador, the third largest city in Brazil, carried out by the Cybercity Research Group (GPC) at the Federal University of Bahia. Anyone can access the map to add new hotspots, give comments, and post links, photos or videos.

These projects could be carried out in the market, offering a mapping of violence, Wi-Fi hotspots, and also interesting points, with visitors’ comments contributing to open and participative content about local territorialities (safety, services and local infrastructure). Mapping and geo-location projects show how new mobile technologies, using informational territorialization (Wi-Fi, Wi-Max and 3G networks) in public space, can produce discourse about urban space. This discursive production has the potential to emphasize aspects that might otherwise remain invisible without collaborative public mapping.

Citix

Electronic Urban Annotations projects allow invisible electronic writing on a specific physical space. Here we can see work with GPS (Sur-viv-all, Identité and Locative Painting), augmented reality (Invisíveis), sound performances (Hapax) and interventions (Poétrica, Egoscópio and Leste o Leste?). GPS projects (writing and drawing) like Locative Painting, Sur-viv-all and Identité could serve as an example of mapping journeys, showing the use of space by visitors to the market, emphasizing regions (used and discarded) and historical aspects of the place—all through an electronic form of writing. Sur-viv-all (2008), by André Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields, was carried out in Edmonton, Canada, writing the word across 40 km of the city. The idea came from Margaret Atwood’s novel Survival, where the writer argues that relationships with survival mark a pattern in the Canadian literary imagination. The electronic writing sought to emphasize the Canadian imaginary and the city. André Lemos’s Identité (2008), was “written” by bicycle through 14 km of Montréal, pointing to one of Québec and Canada’s central questions: identity. Martha Gabriel’s Locative Painting (2008) is GPS painting in accordance with users’ geographical positions, where, based on the interactors’ data (skin color, name, city, country, gender, etc.), visual kaleidoscopes are created that reflect upon interactors’ similarities and differences.

Locative Painting

Another interesting form of electronic writing is the use of augmented reality (Wellner et al., 1993), in order to merge virtual characters in real spaces. Bruno Viana’s work, Invisíveis (2007), could very well place historic characters in a market environment, thus creating a sense of history and belonging. Invisíveis was presented at Arte.Mov 2007 at the Américo Renné Giannetti Park, where people went for a walk while looking at a mobile phone camera and visualizing various “characters”. These characters were meant to represent historic regular visitors and people from the park, merging the past and future, physical and electronic reality.

Invisíveis

The Rio de Janeiro group HAPAX could carry out a sound performance at the market. The group has done musical performances and trips through urban space with mobile phones, computers and GPS. Their “Burro sem Rabo” (“Donkey without a Tail”) (2006) performance mixes “high-” and “low-tech”, producing a sound wave in urban space in accordance with the idea of dislocation; where GPS controlled positioning is converted into sounds. The act of the journey is what produces both music and electronic writing in space, as in the writing of the word “pode” (from the verb “to be able to”) in nearby Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods.

Burro Sem Rabo - A cidade tocada from rcutz on Vimeo.

Hapax

Giselle Beiguelman’s urban intervention work using mobile devices could create tension between advertising space and market visitors’ content production. Poétrica (2002) is a SMS intervention, available on electronic panels located on Paulista, Consolação and Rebouças Avenues in São Paulo, intermittently occupying advertising space. In Leste o leste? (2002), web interfaces and mobile phones allow the public to interfere in urban electronic panels. Tele-intervention dialogs with its immediate surroundings: the busy Radial Leste, a São Paulo avenue surrounded by walls with graffiti and tags. Egoscópio (2002) explores information flow from the Internet and invites the public to dis/organize a collective autobiography of the title character. The site addresses sent were projected on an electronic panel in Ave. Brigadeiro Faria Lima, also in São Paulo. Something similar could be thought up for the market, where public interventions could occupy advertising panels, creating tension between the market and the “world of life”.

Poétrica

Electronic annotation is a kind of electronic graffiti that allows people to say something about their urban environment. All these projects show us how informational territories can be used to write and read the city in a new way. They show how locative media can be a tool that gives people the possibility of creating a new sense of place.

Locative media also allow people who know each other and who share the same place (whether they are aware of this proximity or not) to interact, exchange information and meet in person. These projects are known as Mobile Social Networking; for instance, people circulate and can meet friends at the market through Cícero Silva’s GPSface (2007), reinforcing meetings and social ties. GPSface is an online social network that connects people around the world, showing the interactors’ positions on Google Maps.

New projects, like Google Latitude, are trying to provide everyone with this capacity. Here we can see how an informational territory can help people find each other and engage social relationships by meeting face to face. Mobile social networking projects use smart phones in the context of new informational territorialization of places (3G networks, mainly) to locate friends.

GPSFace

Flash and Smart Mobs are social mobilizations that use mobile devices to organize group actions in an urban public space. The Alô Cidadão (2008) project, a partnership between the NGO Instituto Hartmann Regueira and Instituto Telemar, is not a Smart Mob but would have the potential to offer useful information through SMS. Use of a similar system in the market could very well serve as a citizenship and visitor information tool. The project seeks to help people with low incomes to find employment, and to obtain general local information, such as information about culture, education, job openings and courses, community activities and vaccination campaigns, etc. Developed for residents in the Pedreira Prado Lopes community in Belo Horizonte, the system has proven popular, answering messages received between families and friends. Here we can say that informational territories and locative media create uses of urban space with the goal of gathering and dispersing as quickly as possible—this gathering can be political or aesthetic.

Alô Cidadão Video

Some experiences with Pervasive Computational Games have already been developed in Brazil, the most successful being Alien Revolt (2005) and Senhor da Guerra (2003). In the Belo Horizonte market case, these games could transform the place into a playful sphere with localization or mystery resolution games connected to market questions. Senhor da Guerra—the first such game in Brazil—uses SMS potential to play in the city; in an adaptation of the classic War, the player must conquer tactical regions according to degrees of coverage and player locations. In Alien Revolt, the city becomes the backdrop for battles between aliens. This game enables the identification of players by radar, in a range of up to 3 kilometers.

With these street games, information territories are used to reclaim the streets with ludic imperatives. It’s interesting to see that here, the game uses the physical space as a board, with informational technologies, networks and territories providing the tools to build new meaning for urban spaces—recalling traditional games long played in the streets.

Conclusion.

These hypothetical examples show how locative media could potentially be used in the market, with emphasis on artistic and collaborative projects. In this vein, we might see paintings with GPS (like the Locative painting, Sur-viv-all or Identité projects), interventions like those of the Hapax group, meetings with historic famous people like the Invisíveis project, images projected on billboards via mobile phones such as Poétrica, photos and videos made with street vendors, shared news of local interest with Alô Cidadão, street games like Senhor da Guerra or Alien Revolt, maps of ideas and social issues like Stickers Maps, Wikicrimes and Citix, or connections between people with GPSface.

In attempting to provide a comprehensive picture of locative art in Brazil, I have shown how creating a new territoriality could generate forms of social appropriation, citizenship, and sociability through locative media. The current era of “cyberspace download” links mobility and localization, paradoxically reinforcing the meaning of places. This goes against the idea—prevalent in the “upload era” and related to mass media—that new technologies would only serve to de-territorialize and create failures in the sense of place, community and public space (Meyrowitz, 1985).

The Brazilian situation is in a moment of expansion, but there is still much to be done. The dearth of artistic projects could result in a balance skewed toward merely commercial interventions, which would not take into account the potential of participative content creation and collaboration. Operations of control, such as tracking and surveillance, are also key considerations here; a tactical appropriation (De Certeau, 1984) that is political, social and aesthetic will be crucial for avoiding the use of these devices solely as instruments of information distribution, keeping the user in the position of “mass receiver”.

The Afonso Pena street market was used as an example to show that a real place, conferred with informational territorialization, could be the site for locative media experimentation that creates new meanings of places, reinforcing sociability and historic connections. The example is hypothetical and the market experience today places the visitor in a position of searching and conducting casual meetings with people and products. Even without any form of localization and monitoring, the market facilitates random meetings—and this is a very good place from which to start. On the other hand, having the place located, monitored and controlled could also offer forms of escape to the unusual and rich space of random possibilities. The danger with expanding LBS and LBT is that we might effectively lose ourselves with so much locating.

The street market in Ave. Afonso Pena demonstrates that a real place can serve as the backdrop for experimentation with locative media, and for a social production of the space that strengthens communitarian sociability. However, we must point out that the desire to find and locate everything is a way to rationalize space and to shut down the possibility of surprises. It is a technical way to fight the fear of the stranger and the imponderable. Even in light of glimpsing the potentialities of locative media for the market, it’s nice to live the market as it is: to get lost between its tents, and to find strangers or friends without knowing their location. These kinds of non-predictable action are also an excellent way of appropriating of the space and creating of new meanings of places. Drifting without orientation is a compelling form of meeting the space. As such, it seems that we do not need a tool of localization or “intelligent” information to feel the market. Without a smart phone or GPS, I left myself to walk between the colors, aromas and sounds of the street market. As a flâneur, without any device, I made the market, temporarily, my place (Lemos, 2009).

Notes

1. http://idgnow.uol.com.br/telecom/2008/08/14/brasil-tem-950-mil-
conexoes-a-internet-via-redes-3g-estima-accenture/

2. http://www.mundogeo.com.br/noticias-diarias.php
?id_noticia=4246

3.http://alertatotal.blogspot.com/2008/07/lula-insiste-no-
inconstitucional-chip.html

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Biography

André Lemos is Associate Professor at Faculty of Communication at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBa). Lemos has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Université René Descartes, Sorbonne. He has been a visiting scholar at University of Alberta and McGill University, Canada (2007-2008). He is the coordinator of the Cyberculture Center and the Cybercity Research Group at UFBa, and senior research fellow at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq). He was President of the Brazilian Communication Programs Association (COMPÓS).

I’d like to address the term ‘site’ as a field of semantic migrations, as migrations that occur due to cultural dislocations, linguistic operations, technological influences, poetic licenses or theoretical digressions.

We usually share definitions that could be applied to a number of artistic works that are established in dialogue with their surroundings: as in site-related, context-specific, context-related… site-oriented… . These are the ‘places’ of the word, in its range, differences and associated connotations that both imprison and cause reverberations at the same time.

These denominations, beyond mere word choice, that define the qualities of the ‘site’ are complicated by debates seeking confluences and frictions between art and communication.

For those that do not have English as their native language, such a complication – the semantic exceptions of ‘site’ and its related dis-locations – originates with the use of the term ‘site-specific’. When translated literally to Portuguese, it accumulates even more linguistic risk. In the text-project “site-specific and (un)translatability”, artists Jorge Mena Barreto and Raquel Garbelotti (2008) suggest that the use of the term in the Brazilian context “should experience further elaboration, translation or cannibalization in order to avoid depleting the term’s critical and reflexive content”. In fact, a literal translation like ‘lugar específico’ (something like ‘specific site’) is inaccurate and wrong, because it shifts the placement of the term ‘specific’ – from relating to a quality of the work onto meaning a state of the physical place instead.¹

The appropriation of this thought is due to a common desire to pull the term ‘site-specific’ apart, expanding it further through the relationship between the work and its political, economic and social context. This involves extending it beyond the internal relationships that, in the more conventional fine arts realm, would be attributed to formal elements related to color, texture, composition – or yet depth of field, editing, narrative, rhythm or construal of the diegetic space, in an audiovisual medium.

What matters here is not ‘re-searching’ another discussion on ‘site-specific’, but emphasizing aspects concerning the exteriority of the work of art, in surroundings that include the publicness of shared outside spaces. As Barreto and Garbelotti suggest, “it is through its relation to context that the work starts to build its meaning and its complexity. It’s by dealing with its surroundings that the object or artistic installation reaches its potential.”

Fulcrum (1987) ‘site specific’ sculpture by Richard Serra, commissioned for one of Liverpool Street Station’s entrances in London.

Revisiting artists like Richard Serra, or Robert Smithson, we face the same huge physicality to which their works relate and present themselves. We understand that in these works, such magnitude has a reason, especially when they relate to exterior elements of large scale. Since the 70s, artists like Hans Haacke have explored through their work a similar and yet distinct aspect: the way public space is transformed through the influence of mass communication media and private commercial interests.

Hans Haacke, News, 1969: dealing simultaneously with physical and informational spaces

I’m referring to a supposed movement of de-materialization of the notion of ‘site’ that, from the 70s on, begin to include works in which “sociological mapping is explicit” (Foster, 1996). In this context, site is no longer strictly physical, rather, it is impregnated with meaning that is both social and discursive.

As Miwon Kwon reveals in “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” the term ‘site’ is not defined as a pre-condition but “discursively determined” (2000).² Quoting James Meyer, Kwon discusses location in its functional aspect (‘functional site’) as a process, as an operation that happens between sites, defining location as a place that also overlays information.

For these authors, location becomes functional when it gets defined as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate (including the eventual confrontation of the subject/artist in space, immersed in information such as text, photos, videos, data, physical elements and objects). This is the theoretical space that allows us to review location in the current mobility climate, under the influence of global positioning and geo-localization technologies.

Informational environment and the ‘communicatory’ location

Making use of 90s media aesthetics, and drowning public space with a mix of architecture and communication, the work of Barbara Kruger and more so that of Jenny Holzer demonstrates a presumed dis-location and de-materialization of the site in light of information and visual communication.

Krzystof Wodiczko’s large-scale projections also point to how immaterial information can structure urban public space as much as physical, built architecture – particularly with regard to a common space construal.

The political aspect of these works occupies a hybrid position, traced to the power generated by the meeting of their immaterial presence with the physicality of circulation spaces. Dan Grahan’s architecture-related video projects (designed for social interaction in public spaces) are landmarks given the manner in which social and architectural space, along with immaterial imagery, fuse together.

Nevertheless, every time we think about physical space, we tend to fall upon nostalgic notions of place. As we walk in the streets, gardens, parks or come closer to sculptural or architectural constructions located in public spaces, we would say, ‘nothing compares to the physicality of the space’, when observing or feeling the ambience produced by such constructions … These are nostalgic means for the reading of space, of location, of intimacy – a sense of physicality that nowadays gets mixed with the stimuli we receive from information connected to these places. It’s no longer simple to differentiate architectonic formations from the semiotic idealization of a space, a place or the city itself.

These would be the efficiencies of the so-called corporative ‘semiotic’ capitalism, as described by Maurizio Lazzarato, in which cognitive worlds are “constructed through a statement arrangement, through a sign regime” (2003), within spaces marked by global capitalism. It’s left for us, users or artists, to understand how these relations come about – something that advertisers also do, most of the time under better conditions. Strategies of representation play an important role in defining what could be a new form of alienation in contemporary society, as a result of the semiotic force of a capitalism deeply nested within communication networks.

Amidst this illusionary settlement, it is worth understanding how physical places and spaces complement the feeling of emptiness that certain technologies may cause. As an example, one could understand that the euphoria around virtualities at the turn of the century just kept us tied to computer screens and exclusively technologic networks. While being aware of certain dystopias that sometimes evolve when technologies define patterns of relationships, what is at stake here is to foresee how new wireless networks can allow processes of sharing and exchange, leading to interesting social unfoldings.

During 2004 Sonarsound, a branch of Barcelona’s Sónar in São Paulo, I had the opportunity of curating a show that allowed for the creation of an emblematic work concerning the occupation of voids, and connecting distinct and contrasting spaces.

The project Infinite Column II – Opposites, by Daniel Lima: connecting São Paulo’s west and south zones

The work “Infinite Column II – Opposites” by Daniel Lima consisted of two laser beams projected from two distinct places in São Paulo. One of the beams was placed at the top of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, wherein the multimedia exhibition housed the project, and pointed to São Paulo’s south zone. From its ‘target place’, a public school in the neighborhood of Paraisópolis, another laser beam was sent back to the Tomie Ohtake Institute. Between both points there are more than four miles of non-contiguous spaces, of urban areas that are connected by streets and lanes and yet share few common aspects – in other words, there is a huge social gap between the two neighborhoods. For three days, this horizontal light axis ‘physically’ connected both spaces (taking into account that light is also matter). Although the work took place primarily outside the exhibition space, audiences both within the exhibition and at the public school had access to live video transmissions of the immediate context of their surroundings. During the three nights of the event, the light beam oscillated between the concrete and the ‘immaterial’, projecting itself as a reaction to the social isolation inflicted by the metropolis (a sort of making the invisible visible), and acting like a possible confraternization, a temporary symbolic bridge bringing together isolations and exclusions imposed by the city. Art curator and critic Daniela Labra describes the work as follows:

There’s nothing new, but the children living in Paraisópolis who went all the way up to the top of the building and witnessed how the light was reaching their neighborhood, found out that São Paulo is really huge and has infinite lights that had never illuminated their surroundings. For people who saw the community from the top of such a distant building, the destination point of that light beam was like an explosion, a huge point giving back all the energy of that intense beam, coming from the sky with great violence.

A question is posed here: what is specific about this work? Surely neither the laser beam, nor the technology used and its particular qualities. Which space is it relating to? What is the work’s place? Certainly not the Tomie Ohtake Institute building or the public school in Paraisópolis, but maybe that void in-between and what remains connectable between them.

Different reactions: from the top of Tomie Ohtake Institute exhibition, visitors could observe the laser beam pointed towards remote neighbors of the vast city; in Paraísopolis kids were willing to reach the laser beam with broomsticks.

If technologies, taking into account their mobility and ubiquity, are now getting back to outside physical space, then one should seek out new ways to relate with space and its publicness, including experiences that can take advantage of such mediation possibilities.

locative media

The term ‘locative media’ is new, strange (unfamiliar?) and often strongly contested in ways that are not always constructive. Perhaps “It is a concept that can be misleading or, at least, imprecise” (Bastos & Griffis, 2007).

In technical terms, locative can mean locatable, traceable, tending to be intrusive, and/or serving surveillance purposes, with disciplinary vocation. But deviations are possible, and it is interesting to understand the technological deviations/approximations in the urban space. The so-called locative arts (as defined by Drew Hemment) “are simultaneously opening new paths to worldly dissemination and mapping its own domains and geopolitics”.³ Hemment proposes understanding the term in an inclusive manner, instead of an exclusive one. This can sometimes imply the risk of non-differentiation between locative media and other forms of space-mediated involvement. But it also lead us to face the context, instead of prematurely putting the field in a drawer.

Lately the only options available for people worried about some of the implications brought by new networking technologies is to either turn them off, or never start making use of them to begin with. New mobility politics will arise somewhere between turning it on and turning it off. (Drew Hemment, 2006 lecture at arte.mov symposium)

The construction of a reconfigured idea of ‘site-specific’ in the terms presented until now configures ‘site’ as a space of non-material possibilities, while pointing to actual spaces.

When curating and designing the exhibition “Dislocations: detours of technology in public space” (arte.mov 2007), it was possible to think about a group of projects pertaining to the ‘locative’ approach that presented, as a common element, an inversion of the military procedure of localization, exploring the possibilities that arise in the space between mobile networks and urban space. The projects took into consideration the specific characteristics of the city of Belo Horizonte, and its Municipal Park (which served as a kind of laboratory for the locative installations). Thus, works originally created in other contexts, like “Tactical sound Garden” by Mark Shepard, “Air” by Preemptive Media, or “Motoboys” by Antoni Abad, had some components carefully adapted for the new situation.

“Invisibles” by Bruno Vianna was developed with a commission that resulted in a very specific work, related to specific spots at the Municipal Park, involving its stories, visitors and the environment. The project integrated concepts of mobility, portability and augmented reality via an exploratory stroll in the park, which involved an expedition in search of characters intrinsically related to that space. Users or participants received cell phones that were pre-loaded with a specific application that filtered live feeds from the camera using masks and overlays. It would superimpose previously taken pictures of park visitors onto to the real-time images seen on the cell phone screen. An image recognition algorithm allowed those images to ‘float’ in fixed locations, offering the feeling of a virtual presence in that place.

Visitors were encouraged to explore unknown paths in the park, which is not a typical occurrence, since the park is normally used as a throughway between two major avenues as opposed to a leisure space. Once cued into this exploratory mode, the visitor was to look for ‘active’ places, as recognized by the software application (network-based and GPS hotspots in further versions). This software was designed to identify visitors’ positions and insert different anonymous characters on the screen (from the internal image database), that appear sitting on benches, lying on the grass or near easily-recognizable reference points. Participants who own a Symbian S60 cell phone – such as Nokia’s NSeries – could install the software on their personal cell phones and explore the park independently. As part of the arte.mov Festival, the project was linked to an exhibition space in a gallery, where the viewers could obtain not only the mobile phones and the software, but also the instructions to explore the work in the park outside.

A recurring concern in similar projects, both curatorial and artistic, has been to emphasize the possibilities of re-orienting individuals within the shareable urban space, often through the ludic dimension of the events created. As in a game, people participating in these projects tend to relate to each other in a less defensive fashion. Also, the fact that these projects are very often organized for collective experience suggests the communal potential of wireless technology usage. Spontaneous communal action is growing less frequent, however, due to the need for mediation in big cities such as São Paulo or Belo Horizonte – where these projects have been performed.

Artists working with communication media often use these technologies as a way of making aesthetic, social or political conditions explicit. They attempt to bring to the surface capabilities embedded in existing systems as another relevant strategy (as in a kind of ready-made), which sometimes also reflects conflicting conditions. Curator Steve Dietz comments on this process, and echoes a key question about the pertinence of networked art, when he assumes that “the Internet is more interesting than most net-art works” (2001).

Degree Confluence Project web site: the goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, will then be posted here.

The project “Discontinuous Landscape” by Fernando Velázquez is a contribution that points to this kind of thought, while simultaneously deconstructing the Cartesian or didactic perspective that begins to get associated with certain mobile technology projects.

In the project, participants choose the locations they want to visualize from a coordinates menu by sending an SMS to a server. The available locations are mapped using the Degree Confluence Project’s web site. This site has received a lot of attention, and users who own a GPS device are invited to visit confluence integer points across the globe and take point-of-view photographs. Degree Confluence aims to offer “a geographically mapped sample of the Earth,” mathematically organized in a supposedly precise way. Like other collectively constructed projects (like Google, YouTube, Dailymotion, 12 seconds), it provides an opportunity for users to act as contributors to the project, by posting their testimonies (texts and images) of how they arrived at the specified points and how they registered them.

Discontinuous Landscape is an interactive installation that uses the confluence.org database and SMSs to make collective landscapes. The picture shows the installation in the arte.mov Festival – nov.2008, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Velázquez’s project interacts with this device, searching for images of existing points at Degree Confluence and bringing them to the exhibition context. There is local interaction at the exhibition space and its surroundings, but the project is in fact remotely located (at Degree’s server) and refers to even more remote points. The visitors can also search by themselves for a coordinate confluence in the setting where the work takes place, in order to introduce a more local or directly contextual landscape to the work. One way or another, the project approaches the question of location by denying its math, by taking over someone else’s view, by ‘smuggling’ coordinates from one space to another, by introducing subjective elements and by scrambling the specific.

The idea of place is ever-present in the process, even literally. But what specific ‘site’ does such a work relate to? Certainly not that of the coordinates. What context does the work dialogue with? Presumably with the web context, the yearning to progressively map the planet and, not any less interestingly, it relates to the disposition and mobility of the many individuals that remotely collaborate with the project.

The results are visualized in a group of four projections that form an imaginary landscape; it is discontinuous, but capable of expanding the notions of place and space as fixed territories, destitute of subjectivity.

Another project that inserts the city in the exploration ethic, bringing together physical and informational elements, is “Hiper GPS”. Created by Cicero Inácio Silva and Brett Stalbaum, it applies a hypertext context to the city structure. Walking along the city streets, participants can access, with the aid of GPS-enabled cell phones, a mix of texts, images and pre-recorded sounds in the system. Although not yet implemented and still a work-in-progress, the project moves toward thinking the city not as mesh of geographic coordinates and numbers (latitude and longitude spare data do not mean much to most people), but as sensitive points and regions that can lead people to share stories and eventually discover things in common.

The accessibility and the adoption of the commons (commons as delimited by private interests) are vital elements in the tenuous practices related to mobile technology. By these means, the mobile device has the potential to become less of a new mediation gadget and more a tool of approximation to social reality.

As such, we see an evident yet tentative proliferation of works that deal with great scale and magnitude (i.e. parks, cities), which simultaneously present themselves as almost invisible interventions in physical space. Their configurations affiliate such works with unstable and uncertain categories, just like the concepts related to locative media, but they suggest a possible appropriation of ’site-related’ or ‘context-specific’ ideas – devoid of physicality, and because of that, so reliant upon it.

Premonitions do not matter that much, but it is worth saying that this is a technology that gains support and legitimizes itself through the popularization of its usage and application. No other technology has spread so rapidly as mobiles have been, managing to root themselves in the most popular layers of society.

So, the place of ‘locative’ that really matters to us is not a slogan pushing platitudes like anytime, anywhere, everywhere. Rather, this place begets ideas around the approximation of very powerful practices in the art field, and debates that involve physical spaces and their particularities, tensions and conflicts. It might be a risky approximation to equate works so thoroughly discussed in the art field with others that are not yet really considered as art by the main art circuits. Only time will allow us to discover how to juxtapose, in the same field, the physicality of some with the total immateriality of others. Thus, ‘locative’ is a concept with only tentative and risky affiliations with some of the most relevant work that has been produced under the concept of ‘site-specific’, those of functional sites. For us, it remains to wonder what kind of works will yet appear in this new and muddy ‘site’ that is taking shape in the world.

Notes

1. Adopting the simplicity of Barreto and Garbelotti’s explanation: “in English, the expression site specific is used as an adjective to define the specificity of the work of art. An expression such as “sítio específico” in Portuguese qualifies the physical place as being specific and not the work. It functions as a substantive”, not really suggesting the work as specific to the qualities of the place.

2. Kwon’s texts on site-specificity have been very referred to recently by artists and researchers, that reveals a presumed revival of the study of the place of location in art.

3. http://www.drewhemment.com/2004/locative_arts.html

References

Arns, I. (2000). Social Technologies: Deconstruction, subversion and the utopia of democratic communication. In D. Daniels & R. Frieling (Eds.), Media Art Net.

Bastos, M., & Griffis, R. (2007). Beyond “recombinant/emergent” and “perfomative/locative”. Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Barreto, J. M., & Garbelotti, R. (2008). especificidade e (in)traduzibilidade, base text for debate and workshop: Contemporary Artistic Practices in moving systems or site-specific today, with Jorge Menna Barreto and Raquel Garbelotti, art and Public Scope, Centro Cultural São Paulo and Fórum Permanente.

Dietz, S. (2001). Porque Não Tem Havido Grandes Net-artistas? in Leão, Lucia (ed.) (2004) Derivas: Cartografias do Ciberespaço. São Paulo: Anablume/Senac pp. 137-147

Foster, H. (1996). The return of the real: the avant-garde at the end of the century. London: The MIT Press.

Kwon, M. (2000). One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity. In E. Suderburg (Ed.), Space, Site, Intervention: situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lazzarato, M. (2003). Struggle, Event, Media. Republicart.net.

Meyer, J. (2000). The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site- Specificity. In E. Suderburg (Ed.), Space, Site, Intervention: situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Biography

Lucas Bambozzi is multimedia artist and researcher based in São Paulo, Brazil. His works have been shown in solo and collective exhibitions in more than 40 countries. He directs the arte.mov Mobile Media Art
International Festival.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others who is, no less than they, a slave. How did this change take place? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? To this question I hope to be able to furnish an answer. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)¹

Glocal Emancipation: Beyond the Digital Frontiers

Source: Nielsen, Mobile Media Marketplace report, Q1 2008

Only 2.6% of the Brazilian population has mobile Web browsing habits, compared with 15.6% of the U.S. population; Brazil shows about one-fourth of the intensity of the mobile Web phenomenon that exists in more developed societies. However, mobile phone penetration is quite high, with over 150 million cell phones in service all over the continental extensions of Brazil.

Even Internet access has been on the rise, with Brazilian users playing a substantial part in expressions of digital culture—as in the case of Orkut, which counts 70% of its audience in Brazil—and in a thriving “LAN house” industry. This latter phenomenon is especially prevalent in the peripheries of large Brazilian cities, as well as in every distant village with Internet connectivity—such as Campinápolis, Mato Grosso, which is little more than a former roadside construction barracks and an outpost for neighbouring Xavante Indian tribes.

The processes of digital convergence in a diverse and large country such as Brazil supports a thriving scene of innovations in the emerging field of technology appropriation models. A “tropicalist” approach tends to inform research agendas in Latin America;² tropicalism here is as central as “orientalism” has been for post-colonial scholarship and activism. In his controversial 1978 book, Orientalism, Edward Said uses the term to describe a tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East by the West, as shaped by European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien (“Other”) to the West. This issue has taken on new significance in the post-9/11 world in relation to numerous prejudices that circulate in a “clash of civilizations”. More generally, the post-colonial academic literature reflects awareness of the Other as an issue, especially in certain philosophical circles (such as Lévinas’s dialogical ontology) and media studies (Silverstone’s examination of media and morality, specifically in relation to renewed prejudice against the Other in the expanded “mediapolis”). From the perspective of economic development theory, there is a long tradition of structuralist analyses of Center-Periphery dynamics that, to a large extent, carry on the same essential debates about appropriation of space, time and knowledge within hypercompetitive global societies that are dependent on the virtuosity of the world economy.

Orientalism offers just one conceptual framework for understanding local reactions to Center-Periphery dynamics. In both the global-liberal and the local-activist perspectives, fluctuating tensions within an internationally connected system come to the fore in advance of rules, best practices and civic intelligence.

Conceptually, the challenges of network design and implementation (“social weaving”, so to speak, as in assemblages and re-assemblages of actor-networks) are compounded by the simultaneous interaction of space, time and symbol—the playful evolution of this human e-infrastructure corresponds with values, projects and icons for the audiovisual e-superstructural grids.

“Iconomics”, from this very broad perspective, results from a critical review of the political economy and the macroeconomics of technology transfers and market design aligned with the Center-Periphery system. The evolving actor-network (Latour, 2005) develops and unfolds in the twenty-first century, generating new tools for the creation, management and critique of the information economy as a relatively open and simultaneously global and local network.

Core competencies in this network include multimedia creation, coding and exploitation of icons, on computer or mobile phone screens, in labour, education and health. This is the challenge to be faced by the periphery, which involves not only the usual scarcity of capital and infrastructure but a new challenge in terms of information asymmetries (Stiglitz, 2001).

Existing technological and economic gaps are compounded by social and cultural differences which are immaterial or intangible, and which are related more closely to the realm of icons than to the requirements of things (hardware, software) and beings (evolving social networks). The iconicity of this evolutionary development is also an index of new metrics for consumption and audiovisual knowledge creation chains. The intangible assets thus produced (real, digital or virtual) are differentially appropriated by individuals, groups and property rights owners (in all classes of assets). The recovery of the world economy depends on this new accountability as much as on the survival of this bank or that company.

The key strategic issue for iconomic development policies, as well as for research programs, is thus the design of an ethno-methodology which remains open to the phenomenology of these differences and asymmetries in icon creation skills as sources of value, accumulation and wealth, both locally and globally. Identifying local patterns of communication skills appropriation may also lead to the development of emancipatory roadmaps, which might prove useful for policymakers and civic activists looking for other possible glocal worlds.³

Iconomics as Physical, Symbolic and Social Appropriation of Real and Virtual Assets

The social and economic impact of the cell-phone is both conditioned and stimulated by all the simultaneous changes in other communication channels (radio, TV, press, cinema, Web N.0), in a market system that has been transforming rapidly from industrial to services and post-services economic structures. Technology and markets advance hand in hand as the service economy increasingly becomes an “iconomy” (requiring technological skills appropriation as a new competence for the marketing of labour).

If we are indeed to live well through the digital convergence of technologies and markets, the sometimes disturbing signal coming from social and environmental tensions is also a necessary foundation for policy; yet there is no established framework for the negotiation of positions and projects in this newly networked infrastructure. The collapse of the financial system is proof of the unstable nature of confidence-based networks, supposedly regulated by automated econometric algorithms.

The icon is the interface, the medium is the message. This metaphorically visual source of value is at the heart of a new theory of value as attention span, overcoming both classical and neoclassical economics into a Schumpeterian vision of the audiovisuality of value as an intensification of attention in time, which translates as icons.

Icons themselves may be stressed, distrusted or melt down—from the international standing of the dollar to the stability and conformity of married life, from having a job to being a democrat, from Lehman Brothers to “BRICs” as a supposedly decoupled territory in a globally unstable economy. Every decision-making moment is laced with iconic references to confidence in technology, rationality and wellbeing.

As with agricultural or business cycles, markets for icons also fluctuate; the underlying convergence of valuation models into financially traded icons requires a high degree of coordination among those who would take advantage of this iconic managerial arrangement. Marketing agencies, the movie industry, fashion and massive consumption habits emerge as vested interests and stakeholders with vivid expression in the global media arena.⁴

There are iconoclasms in contemporary media-centric capitalism, crises which put a check on the media´s capacity to channel attention so as to become a vital source of added value flows in the economy of fragmented attention spans, “long tails” and totalitarian pleasure promotion in contemporary audiovisual society. “Creative destruction” acquires a new meaning as urban megaclusters accumulate underlying and pressing energies of collective waste and unsustainable expenditure.

The challenge of living in the twenty-first century will be “to comprehend —without recourse to austerity and self-denial—the inevitable and necessary shift from a civilization founded on waste to one based on Bataillean expenditure”.⁵ An energetic political economy is needed in order to grasp the iconic nature of digital capitalism.

Our main tenet is that digital infrastructures and social networks are valued as long as they become associated with existing or newly created icons, so that beings and things become active as long as their movement is coded and signaled through audiovisual icons “on demand” and in real time.

The space-time of icons comprises an iconomy, rather than just another economic combination of resources in defiance of markets and hierarchies due to imperfect information on technological asymmetries. The accumulation of intangible assets by corporations, as well as new policy frameworks related to the fostering of knowledge and cultural assets, may eventually lead to Iconomics as a new research program and ideological framework for the design of human development projects.

The quintessential and visible emblems of this “iconic turn” in the social sciences are the groupware innovations that characterize the evolution of the Internet, generating both R&D prodigies (such as the genome project and grid computing) and branding blockbusters (such as MySpace, Orkut, Napster, BitTorrent, iTunes and similar networked branding strategies). Branding knowledge, rather than just ICT-based market expansion and wealth creation, becomes a key issue from an iconomic perspective.

The challenging hybridism of the global, local and individual (even intimate) dimension of life inspires new economic models, while creatively branded clusters lead to the emergence of new markets, hierarchies and needs. As the market for the masses is overcome by a mass of emerging, niche markets (as described by the concept of “the long tail”), the tangible effects of the pervasive computing model, with which we are dressing and mapping our bodies, houses and streets, increasingly are intensively perceived as intangible, iconic strategies along with collaborative (groupware, grid and cloud computing, open source) technological effects.⁶

The design of connections as the combinatory art of symbol and code creation pushes research and development models beyond the efficacy of computing networks. A richer perception of value creation in the networked society requires due attention to the genius of icon design, especially as it evolves into new and more varied forms of identity and value creation—thus altering the profile and the effectiveness of production, distribution and finance systems.

Minorities and underserved communities will enhance or change their socio-economic and political stance as long as they appropriate not only technologies, but the iconic potential made more accessible by freely available networking infrastructures.

Motoboys in São Paulo: Physical, Technical and Social Mobility as Icons

In the specific case of the “motoboys” in São Paulo, icon development may pose a key survival challenge. Motoboys live in a state of flux, since on the one hand, they are deemed absolutely necessary by hundreds of businesses for performing a “sanguine” circulation that supports daily urban life; on the other hand, they also became an object of derision insofar as their ubiquity and usually reckless driving habits (involving frequent accidents, with more than one casualty per day in the streets of São Paulo) have oftentimes been depicted as expressions of the bad, the ugly and the poor. Motoboys’ mobility is mostly physical, marked by low levels of technical skill, and they carry a bad reputation, despite their function of supporting activity in the densest urban hub of Latin America.

Given the overcrowding of urban spaces, mobility in fact creates a competitive advantage in the platforms for numerous services. Transportation and communication technologies become mutually embedded, while the costs and externalities of developing ever more complex transportation matrices also come to the fore, as traffic jams turn out to be a major source of inefficiencies and low quality of life in big cities.

The Internet has typically been associated with the suppression of distance, and even with the avoidance of transportation and physical dislocations—from distance education to Second Life educational and business applications, much of the Web seems tailored to serve immobility, even to the point of provoking health concerns. (The Wii console, for instance, has been praised by many a commentator as a healthier digital device insofar as the players take advantage of the movement features in sports-like videogames.)

Motoboys are perceived ambiguously as a source of mobility and as a hindrance to civilized behavior in our over-clogged cities. An interesting description of the motoboy phenomenon that pivots on its paradoxical relation to society has been offered by the New York Times’ Larry Rohter under the headline, “Pedestrians and Drivers Beware! Motoboys Are in a Hurry”:

In a city with nearly 11 million inhabitants and 4.5 million passenger cars, 32,000 taxis and 15,000 buses, traffic jams more than 100 miles long are not uncommon, and even on an ordinary day, getting from one side of town to the other can take two hours or more. Only one group here in South America’s largest city seems immune to those frustrations and delays: the daring army of motorcycle messengers known as “motoboys”.

This comparative advantage, however, comes at a cost, as these reckless drivers are always

[…] zigzagging among stopped cars, ignoring lane markers, red lights and stop signs, they regularly menace pedestrians and infuriate motorists as they zoom their way down gridlocked streets and highways, armed with the knowledge that without them business would grind to a halt. Though no one is sure of their exact numbers, estimates start at 120,000 and range as high as 200,000. Many work 12 hours a day or more to earn a salary of $300 a month or less. According to official figures, São Paulo now has 332 motoboy agencies. Competition is strong, and they adopt names, often in English, stressing efficiency: Adrenaline Express, Moto Bullet, Fast Express, Agile Boys, Motojet, Fly Boy, Motoboy Speed, AeroBoy Express, Fast Boys.

Identity problems loom as these agents of flow are dehumanized:

“The truth is that we’re discardable,” said Edson Agripino, 38, a veteran of 15 years as a motoboy. ‘When a colleague gets hurt or killed, the first thing the dispatchers ask is, ‘Did he deliver the document?’”

Rohter further comments on this thorny identity issue:

[…] many motoboys, especially the younger ones, see themselves as free spirits or urban cowboys, defying the conventions of society and envied by stodgy wage-earners stuck in their cars and offices. […] Everybody hates the motoboys except when they need one themselves, said Caíto Ortiz, the director of “Motoboys: Crazy Life,” a recent prize-winning documentary. “When he’s rushing some document of yours across town, then he becomes your savior, a hero, and you adore the guy.”

In short, mobility is an icon of modernity and a competitive advantage in jammed urban settings, where a living network of mobile agents is seen as necessary at the same time as it is despised. This particular iconography is tinted by a special form of “class struggle” between those who can move—the motoboys—and those who are stickier, slower and more regulated—the car drivers and pedestrians. The importance of mobility as an asset in networked societies has been thoroughly discussed, for instance, by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005):

In a reticular world, social life is composed of a proliferation of encounters and temporary, but reactivable connections with various groups, operated at potentially considerable social, professional, geographical and cultural distance. The project is the occasion and reason for the connection. […] Projects make production and accumulation possible in a world which, were it to be purely connexionist, would simply contain flows, where nothing could be stabilized, accumulated or crystallized. (p. 104)

As a worker would contribute to the production process without access to the fruits of accumulation, the motoboy is an agent of flows and contributes to the transportation process but is always on the side of the “endless stream of ephemeral associations,” while customers and motofreight entrepreneurs mill their benefits and accumulate out of this flux. A research as well as a political issue, then, is to inquire into how motoboys might establish their own projects, aspire to their own forms of knowledge, and realize networking and identity formation potentials despite their disposable status in the game of iconic flows.

Where art thou?

The “Motoboy Channel” (“canal*MOTOBOY”) was launched in May 2007 as a public art project by Antoni Abad, a Spanish artist who uses digital technology in video and installation art. Abad works in several countries, primarily with marginalized groups, including migrants, the disabled, prostitutes and gypsies, as well as taxi drivers and motoboys.

According to Osava (2008), Abad initially persuaded 12 motoboys to record their daily lives using their cell-phone cameras. Accidents, crimes, water pollution, traffic jams, street protests, street art (like graffiti) and various other events made up a visual diary of the city, in photos, video or short texts that instantly Webcast through the Channel’s Website. The group leader, Eliezer Muniz, a former motoboy who graduated in Philosophy at the University of São Paulo, also created a study group and has since made numerous efforts and promoted events favoring a remaking of motoboy identity and culture.⁷

Muniz imagines “10,000 motoboys” reporting by text, photos and videos from all over the country, in a new-style news agency that will offer a different, wider and more democratic view of urban life. “A revoluçao cultural dos motoboys” (The Motoboys’ Cultural Revolution) was the headline under which the Brazilian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique reported a May 2008 cultural event promoted by the canal*MOTOBOY.

However, as inspiring as this cultural project may be, in some ways it remained as a record of the Spanish artist’s project. From the motoboys’ perspective, Abad could then be just another “customer” who has made use of motoboy experiences (in this case, for art production and reinforcement of certain icons), without those experiences having been directly appropriated by the motoboys themselves toward their own projects and accumulation needs. This case offers an ideal study of information asymmetries as a source of differential appropriation of iconic values—this is how I initially approached the project, after participating in a roundtable during the canal*MOTOBOY exhibition at the São Paulo Cultural Center.

As a matter of fact, the canal*MOTOBOY was developed with a technology that the motoboys themselves do not fully understand, nor have they ever mastered. The group has not grown after two years of numerous events and efforts; part of the team has moved on to other endeavours, and the project’s survival as supported by the motoboys is not guaranteed, despite all the media buzz generated by roundtables, civic calls and publications supported by Spanish government cultural agents. Abad, on the other hand, has extended his own experimental endeavours so as to “network” with canal*LLEIDA, canal*LEON, canal*INVISIBLE, canal*ACCESSIBLE (Golden Nica, Digital Communities Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Premi Nacional de Catalunya d’Arts Visuals 2006) and canal*CENTRAL.

Other liquid, post-modern artists validate the locative art embodied in this asymmetrical appropriation of artistic network externalities. Consider for example Lucas Bambozzi, who claims to be among those who problematize public space, trying to identify “what kind of tools could operate in order to promote an approximation to social reality,” thus “piercing into the bubbles which keep apart the subject and his experience of public life.”⁸ This brief statement alone poses some major challenges regarding asymmetrical appropriation, as it clearly focuses on the discovery of some gadget, some tool to “pierce the bubbles”—framing the artist as an activist-surgeon.

Abad deserves praise for his status as a “truly public artist,” who does not position himself in “the social” or in “public space” as a strategy to reap public grants, as Bambozzi has stressed, but as a means of creating activist public art. This distinction is particularly salient when public art involves the appropriation of technological tools produced for the mass communication market. From a techno-centric perspective, the artist threatens to become a magical or ex-machina “master of technological tools” ready to create a situation, locally, temporarily and without lasting relations between the social actors engaged in the artistic project in the course of “public” art performances.

Technological situationism may eventually lead artists to share the same fetishistic relation to the technologies used to recreate “public space” - or to audiovisually produce public space as yet another recreational space, as those promoted by corporate owners (and sponsors) of those same technological tools we are supposed to appropriate for our own good (not necessarily convergent with a corporate sponsor’s agenda).

From an iconomic perspective, creation (or recreation) does not result from the utilization of tools but rather from the iconic appropriation of these tools in contextualized action.

My interaction and later research projects with motoboys begin at the point where Abad “ends” his artistic project—yet there is a caveat here: Abad’s project has not actually ended, so long as at least some of the motoboys involved are still working on processing new information brought to them by the project and the Canal Motoboy thrives. A motoboy action-research-program came to life in the context of the “City of Knowledge” research agenda as designed by the CMDAL project (“Comunicación Móvil y Desarrollo en America Latina”), a research project coordinated by Manuel Castells and sponsored by Fundacion Telefónica (2008-2009). In a way, the impact of Abad’s experiment has not diminished over time, although my own appropriation of the motoboys’ agenda implies a critical view with respect to the morality of the artwork itself.⁹

Sustainability issues, especially those related to appropriation patterns and artistic interventions, mainly have to do with time—the artwork is in itself eternal, while it may also have more or less lasting effects on the “public” that is exposed to the deus ex-machina of a new ICT tool or recreational mis-en-scéne. Some of the sustainability issues clearly at risk in Abad’s intervention become central from the perspective of iconomic analysis; income as well as knowledge creation are as important as the symbolic act of creating an island of representation and identity in an ocean of daily anonymous massacres.¹⁰

To fully grasp the value of icon creation (clicking on cell phones, for instance) the motoboy would have to emancipate him or herself from the digital tool. This would necessitate the re-designing of a social, economic and political network that positions the motoboy as a subject of the appropriation process, enabling ideal representations to be constituted on-the-go, in light of survival and control issues. The symbol may not be a valuable icon in itself, unless it is associated with products, services, and real (as well as virtual) mobile connections beyond this or that concrete use of a cell phone designed with some dated technology, interface or service tool.

An emancipatory motoboy project would have to be created by the motoboys themselves as protagonists, through a lengthier and hands-on action-research-program which could, among other results, reinforce the hypothesis of “motoboys making extra money by shooting pictures with their cell phones” (one possible lesson of Abad´s direct action).

The opportunity to engage in such post-artistic media (and culturally mediated) production activities in the motoboy community has been provided through the Telefónica Foundation project on mobile communications, which commissioned an econometric study of the demand for cell phones in this key urban actor-network (a group of research fellows worked under the coordination of Manuel Castells).

In the second semester of 2008, the “City of Knowledge” initiated a series of focus groups with various social movements in São Paulo, as part of the “Audiovisual Media Management Program” (GeMA), a social informatics project hub (known as “GeMA”), supported by the University´s “Learning with Culture and Extension” program. Among those participating in the process, some were former leaders of the Canal Motoboy project, such as Luiz Fernando Bicchioni, which had become a director of cultural affairs at the São Paulo Motoboy Union (SINDIMOTO) and was intrigued by the potential return that Abad´s project could actually bring to the motoboys themselves.

MotoAngels: a new icon is born

The social, cultural and political issues related to São Paulo’s motoboys cannot be examined without an economic understanding of their organization, as well as a more detailed examination of their cell phone usage patterns.

Their actual appropriation of the cell phone is still poorly understood; the exhilarating images produced as part of an artistic performance do not pierce any imaginary bubble except for the passive enjoyment of a cultural performance that simulates, at most, the potential for a “reactivation” of connections, as noted by Boltanski and Chiapello.

The reengineering of flows requires a mastery of mobile technologies, which the motoboys (even those involved with the canal*MOTOBOY experiment) do not possess. The challenge at stake is one of effectively empowering motoboys, so as to create an authentic opportunity for them to design, develop and manage their own iconic assets. The role of cell phones in this potential bottom-up iconomic reengineering is yet to be determined.

The City of Knowledge, a research-action program at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has pioneered local development projects since 2001, funded mostly by State agencies (Federal as well as regional). These projects focus on experimenting with ICTs for socio-economic inclusion and, as we have came to define in 2005, “emancipation” both through and apart from the digital (thus our criticism of hardware-centered approaches such as the “One Laptop per Child” project or the canal*MOTOBOY).

What matters here is not the quality of the tool itself, be it open source, social networking, mobile or ICT4D related, but mainly the icon creation skills implicated in these different and ever-evolving technological platforms. In order to make sense out of gadgets, effective literacy teaching and capacity building become more critical than the supposedly libertarian open and free distribution of ready-made hardware and software. There is an underlying need for informational education, that is, education for the challenge of using and being information, an infoeducational as well as educommunicative perspective is needed.¹¹

Nonetheless, motoboys and cell phones offer an inspiring combination. The outcome of this combination might not be a frozen digital asset, but it is a truly community-based construction of collective organizations as varieties of knowledge-management challenges, which might be addressed on a socio-constructivist basis.

The main challenge in constructing knowledge-creating public spaces—that involve forms of “meaning creation” among different organizations, and thus different organizational cultures—is to adequately address interaction as a top priority. The changing potential of the underlying technological infrastructure must become increasingly transparent in order to facilitate the movement of tacit knowledge as a permanent flow of intangible assets.

New modalities of knowledge production, wealth sharing and identity formation would then be supported by project-based connections among agents, mirroring the “city by projects” (cité par projets) paradigm, as depicted by Boltanski and Chiapello. The idea of weaving a knowware—that is to say, a space-time of community-based icons designed through shared and diversified learning practices in hybrid (virtual and real) networking practices—embraces research on the anthropology of digital networks wherein work, learning and innovation co-exist in a state of play.

This situation could also be depicted as a special form of “class struggle” between those who are nowhere, as long as they can move—such the motoboys—and those who are somewhere, thus stickier, slower and more regulated— such as car drivers, pedestrians and clients who can “move” only insofar as they access mobile agents using mobile communication devices in a far from efficient telecomputing commercial grid.

The “MotoAngels” project aims at opening new job, identity and income generating opportunities so as to improve the conditions of life in this urban setting. It is an ongoing research project which aims at a contribution to the design of mobile digital interfaces for local entrepreneurship in the freight services sector of major urban hubs, such as the Greater São Paulo area.

Based on both quantitative and qualitative experimental methods, this action-research-program initiative may lead to the formulation of sustainable strategies and innovative business models based on empirical analysis as well as on experimental and experiential proofs of concept. The associated metrics will bring more evidence into language patterns for civic intelligence such as digital emancipation (Schwartz, 2008) in mobile communication as well as in other open spaces for the social design of virtual interfaces.

Measures of efficacy and network externalities into the matrix of local activities intelligently connected to the research mobile will precisely indicate which types of local hubs thus generated by the designed networked interface are effectively acquiring skills, identity and value. Empowerment, income generation and innovation will be measured by a composite index based on time, space and communication variables measured in real time.

This experimental project in the management of mobile communities of practice with a focus on traffic and freight segments of the urban economy will critically reflect on the presence of mobile ICTs in urban spaces, focusing on issues such as mobility, ubiquity and pervasiveness of hardware, software and cultural infrastructures.

From theoretical and methodological perspectives, this project may contribute to empirical research geared towards development and innovation in web semantics, emphasizing digital empowerment tools (portals and blogs, complementary currencies and measures of intangible assets such as reputation, trust, emancipation) and performing on the ground as an incubator of innovative and sustainable enterprises and projects for human development and the attainment of the Milennium Goals.

Motoboys will be qualified so as to become “mobiquituous” (mobile and ubiquitous) cultural facilitators for local artistic development in the Greater São Paulo Area. The main activity to be carried out will be peer to peer mobile production and distribution of local artistic activities developed by “motoboys” and “motogirls” educated as cultural facilitators (ringtones, wallpapers, social, environmental and technical communities of practice), under training and monitoring by the City of Knowledge, a research group at the Department of Film, Radio and TV of the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo.

A new source of identity for motofreight workers and their families will be experienced, as they become members of a cultural production and distribution network, thus creating a human development framework for a large contingent of young workers (there is an estimated number of 300,000 “motoboys” working daily in the Greater São Paulo area, most of them without stable contracts or working as autonomous and informal delivery people, with an average of one death every day as they criss-cross the heavy traffic of the megalopolis). A new source of income will be associated to accumulation of intellectual and cultural capital by young cultural entrepreneurs among low-income familites (royalties from the distribution of artistic content produced by the motoboys in their communities, knowledge and technical skills related to digital audiovisual production and m-commerce, potential fundraising tool for local development campaigns, sponsorships and partnerships).

Last, but not least, a new source of social and technical knowledge resulting from an engaged citizenship through civic campaigns associated to digital cultural production for the cellphone as part of a broader sensibilization and mobilization of the urban motofreight sector for issues and values such as security in traffic, adequate maintenance of urban areas and equipment, starting with sustainable use of oil, motor and other hardware, digital inclusion through mobile socio-cultural networks (thus combining cell phones with web 2.0 application and digital audiovisual streaming channels in real time).

This new open space for social networking is expected to become a mobiquitous artistic and cultural production may be associated to local development goals in different areas such as HIV and other public health issues, security, pollution, traffic and driving educational challenges.

New mobiquituous art forms resulting from the mobilization of a large community of young adults living in underserved communities will enable talented motoboys and motogirls, besides delivering their daily packets and routines, to become agents of digital inclusion and income generation, “delivering” local art production projects (music, images, video, poetry, storytelling, dance, technological performances and educational games) to a larger audience within local communities and beyond (mobile content markets).

At the end, Anton Abad´s situationist intervention will eventually take new forms of artistic and cultural expressions, as a seed well watered and illuminated by the interest, engagement and entrepreneurship of the motoboys themselves. The final result may not be a “canal motoboy”, but rather the opening of channels for motoboys to become angels of new professional, civic and artistic projects. Motoboys are as they move on, maybe they can make progress given a chance to move up as living angels.

Notes

1. Rousseau, J. J. (1960). Subject of the First Book. In E. Barker (Ed.), The Social Contract [1762], (169). London: Oxford University Press.

2. See Bar, Pisani & Weber (2007).

3. For a basic view of digital emancipation as a language pattern for civic intelligence, see Schwartz (2008), in D. Schuler (Ed.), Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Retrieved from the Public Sphere Project.

4. Arsenault, A.H., & Castells, M. (2008). The Structure and Dynamics of Global Multi-Media Business Networks. International Journal of Communication 2, 707-748.

5. See Stoekl (2007).

6. See Anderson’s (2004) The Long Tail. After the “Big Fail”, long tail models are also a source of “change-for-your-life” survival techniques as capitalism fragments into non-capitalist trading territories. See also http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/03/terrific-survey-of-free- business-models-online.html

7. I was invited to the discussion forum in May 2007, which took place at the São Paulo Cultural Center, with support from the Sáo Paulo prefecture and Spanish cultural agencies. Since then, the City of Knowledge research group has been interacting with the Channel and other motoboys, especially with entities such as the SINDIMOTOSP (workers union), SETCESP and AEMFESP (motofreight business associations in the State of São Paulo). This experimental work in progress was at first integrated into the Fundación Telefónica research project on the impacts of mobile communications in Latin America under the coordination of Castells, but did not make it to the final report (to be published in 2009).

8. See Bambozzi (2008).

9. Adler, A.M. (2009). Against Moral Rights. NYU School of Law.

10. Sawchuk, K. (Interviewer), & Abad, A. (Interviewee). (2008). Registering Realities, Parasiting Networks: An Interview with Antoni Abad. Wi: Journal of Mobile Media.

11. These approaches have been the subject of research and teaching at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, where Edmir Perrotti promotes infoeducational projects and Ismar Soares develops educommunication as an alternative to functionalism and rationalism in education and communication practices.

References

Bambozzi, L. (2008). Interfaces Expandidas: Conexões Críticas.

Bar, F., Pisani, F., & Weber, M. (2007). Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: Baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism. In Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina, April 2007. Buenos Aires: Fundación Telefónica.

Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Osava, M. (2008). Delivery Boy Newshounds Show Life in Sao Paulo. IPS News. June 18.

Plonski, G.A., (2007). A Inovação e as Demandas Sociais, in Marcovitch, J., (org.), Crescimento Econômico e Distribuição de Renda – Prioridades Para a Ação, EDUSP-SENAC.

Rohter, L. (2004). Pedestrians and Drivers Beware! Motoboys Are in a Hurry. New York Times, November 30.

Schwartz, G., (2008). Digital Emancipation, in Schuler, D. (ed), Liberating Voices, A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution, MIT Press.

Stoekl, A. (2007). Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Biography

Gilson Schwartz is professor at the Department of Film, Radio and TV, School of Communication and Arts at University of São Paulo and Coordinator of the PRO-IDEAL Consortium (Promoting an ICT Dialogue between Europe and América Latina) under the FP7 of the European Commission.

Image from the Mobile Minded posters exhibition at I Mobilefest 2006

In the South American context, especially in Brazil, the main theories adopted by scholars of communication studies for decades have been the critical theories rooted in the Frankfurt School, mainly represented by the works of T. W. Adorno and J. Habermas. With the advent of the new media culture, also called digital or cyberculture, the trends in critical theory took new directions with the works of J. Baudrillard and P. Virilio. Among the new key issues of the critical debate were “the end of real time”, “the collapse of space”, “the agony of the real”, “the disappearance of experience”, “the obsolescence of the body”, “dromocracy”, “immateriality”, and “simulation”.

In the era of fixed Internet connections, when access to the Web depended on wires—now also referred to as the first phase of cyberspace and cyberculture—the above issues seemed to provide an adequate account of the state of the art in the domain of communication. The opposition between the real and the virtual gave rise to disturbing questions concerning the way virtualization seemed to pose a threat to the real texture of life. However, the advent of mobile devices and the rapid evolution of cyberspace from fixed to mobile Internet are now beginning to challenge the dichotomy of the virtual and the real in light of the many overlaps and interrelations between both.

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the relevance of the concept of hybridization, and to show that being hybrid has been part of the very essence of cyberspace from the start. The trend towards hybridization has reached its climax in the present mixtures of virtual and physical spaces, especially with locative media. As these media nurture a pluralistic cultural ecology, their multifaceted communication processes demand new theories that more adequately describe and analyze the diversity of their implications.

1. Hybridism in Various Fields

Hybrid, hybridism, and hybridization are the attributes that have most frequently been used to characterize various facets of contemporary societies. These words can be applied, for example, to social forms, cultural mixtures, media convergence, the eclectic mix of languages and signs and even to the constitution of the human mind.

In the field of culture, the word “hybrid” first achieved its notoriety when Néstor García Canclini (1989) published Hybrid Cultures: Strategies to Get In and Out of Modernity. Indeed, it is hard to think of a more appropriate word than “hybrid” to characterize the instabilities, interstices, shifts and reorganizations across cultural settings, the interactions and reunions of levels, genres and forms of culture, the intersection of identities, the transnationalization of culture, the rapid growth of technology and communication media, the expansion of cultural markets and the emergence of new consumption habits. With this book, Canclini won the Latin American Studies Association prize in 2002, as the best book about Latin America; since then, the concept of hybridism has become ubiquitous in contemporary socio-cultural analysis.

Almost synonymous with syncretism and fusion, the adjective “hybrid” was preferred by Canclini because it encompasses several intercultural mixtures—not simply racial. This word also allows for the inclusion of modern forms of hybridization better than “syncretism”, a term which usually refers to religious forms of fusion or traditional symbolic mergers.

What Canclini was bringing forth as the defining characteristics of Latin American cultural territories coincides with the agenda of post-modernity at an international level, starting in the 1980s, with the deepening of the transnationalization of culture and the rapid growth of technology and communication media. Within the post-modern scenario, the term “hybridism” found fertile ground to expand, especially in the context of the sort of post-colonial criticism according to which the idea of homogeneous cultures, contiguous and consensual transmission of historical tradition and ethnic cultures should undergo a profound revision (see Bhabha, 1998).

However, the rapid expansion and the more intense usage of the word “hybridism” was destined to emerge with the explosion of digital culture or cyberculture in the mid-1990s. Again, the winds were blowing in Canclini’s direction with the emergence of global networks of communication accelerated by the WWW, whose media convergence and mixture of systems of signs have been referred to by the terms hybridism, hybridity and hybrid.

In 1984, in his quintessential cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, science-fiction writer William Gibson coined the term cyberspace. Although the author had no clear idea of its object of reference, this concept was a premonition. Shortly afterwards, as stated in the book Cyberspace: First Steps (Benedikt, 1993), this parallel universe—which has its headquarters on the Internet, and shelters megacities, or data trade, and a multitude of portals and sites of all kinds—has been called cyberspace.

What constitutes that which exists in a place without place and that is at the same time, a myriad of places? Such a reality—artificial or virtual—is multidirectional, merged within a global network, and supported by computers that act as means of generation and access. In this reality in which each computer is a window, the objects seen and heard are neither physical nor, necessarily, representations of physical objects, but have the form, nature and action of data, pure information. It is certainly a reality that derives in part from the operations of the natural world (physical), but which is composed by the traffic of information produced by human enterprise in all areas: art, science, business and culture (Benedikt, 1993, p. 116). Finally, it is an area in which information is not foreign to us, but a space that places us inside information (Novac, 1993, p. 207).

How does cyberspace relate today with virtual reality, information visualization, graphic user interfaces, networks, multimodal communication, games, Second Life, media convergence, hypermedia? Cyberspace relates to all, and includes all, for it has the ability to gather and focus all these facets around a common goal. Thus, cyberspace should be conceived as a global virtual world which is coherent, regardless of how it is accessed and navigated. In fact, there are several ways to enter cyberspace. One can do that through the sensitive animated images on one’s desktop display, through the technology of virtual reality that seeks to recreate the human sensory experience as fully as possible, through the swarm of wireless devices, iPhones, smart-phones, even through direct neural electrodes.

Cyberculture is the culture of cyberspace. Until very recently, both cyberculture and cyberspace referred only to a grounded Internet, embodied in huge mix of subsidized infrastructures, private enterprise networks, information centers of all kinds, a myriad of discussion groups, sites, blogs, etc.: actually, an associative structure which shelters all kinds of economic predators. Being a decentralized giant, this grounded Internet fosters no universal rules of the game. More recently, however, mobile equipment has been offering alternative doors of access to cyberspace in the constitution of a mobile Internet. One of its most evident consequences is that the hybridity of cyberspace and cyberculture has grown considerably in the dense mixtures and overlaps between physical and virtual spaces.

2. Interstitial Spaces

Hybrid spaces and hybrid reality are key terms by means of which Souza e Silva (2006) interrogates the vanishing borderlines between digital and physical spaces in the composition of connected spaces:

Hybrid spaces combine physical and digital in a social environment created by the mobility of users connected via mobile devices of communication. The emergence of portable technology has contributed to the possibility of being constantly connected to digital space and, literally, to carry the Internet around wherever one goes. (p. 28)

In a hybrid space, it is no longer necessary to leave the physical space to get into digital environments, and this eliminates the traditional distinction between physical and digital spaces. Hence, the borderlines between digital and physical spaces become blurred and more and more indistinguishable.

Souza e Silva’s idea of hybrid spaces is very close to what Lemos (2008) calls information territories, that is, control areas of the digital information flux in a zone of intersection between cyberspace and urban space. Information access and control are accomplished by means of mobile devices and wireless nets. An information territory is not the cyberspace per se, but it is a moving, hybrid space constructed in the interrelation between the electronic and the physical space.

What Souza e Silva calls hybrid spaces and Lemos describes as information territories, I have called “interstitial spaces” (Santaella 2007a). The term serves to emphasize the dissolution of the rigid boundaries between physical space on the one hand and virtual space on the other, and it describes the emergence of a new space that can no longer be said to belong to the one or the other space. Although the epithet “interstitial” does not introduce an idea differing essentially from the one which is implicit in the term “hybrid”, I prefer the concept “interstitial” to draw attention to the intermingling, the mélange of two distinct realities giving rise to a new one.

Furthermore, interstitial spaces is a more specific expression than hybrid spaces, since hybridism is also being broadly used to mean what is happening across various levels of reality: from contemporary cultures to the media, as represented by communication networks, and also at the root of the media, the hybridism between textual, sound and visual signs. The trajectory of hybridism shows that its trend is to expand in multiple directions, and that the digital revolution in general is increasingly exploring the limits of its possibilities.

All this seems to give reason to what Smith (2003, p. 23) implies when, relying on Donald (2001), he states that the modern mind has become a hybrid structure, built of biological traces from previous stages, along with symbolic resources of an external storage—which today consists of a number of sign systems, produced thanks to increasingly sophisticated intelligent technologies. Indeed, we have evolved in tune with the environment at multiple levels, with multilevel tuners.

In this context of an extended usage of the concept of hybridization and hybridism, to characterize the hypercomplex plot of the buzzing cauldron of identities, styles, genres, techniques, practices, technologies, media and mixtures constituent of contemporary cultural hybridism, I have been developing the idea of a pluralistic ecology of languages, practices and cultures. As we all know, ecology is the study of the distribution of living organisms and how this distribution is affected by interactions between such organisms and the environment. The environment of an organism includes both the physical properties such as climate, geology etc., as well as other organisms that share the same habitat.

Similarly, a pluralistic ecology of culture refers to a considerable expansion of the parameters that have traditionally served to define the products and practices of language and communication. Instead of searching for legitimacy in terms of institutionally sanctioned principles, a pluralistic ecology aims at tracing the networks of cultures and logical operations in a broadly-conceived spatial, temporal, social and environmental context. There could not be a more prototypical example of such ecology than the one that is found in the locative media that thrive in interstitial spaces. These multifaceted communication processes find fertile ground for development in Brazil especially, given that Brazilian culture takes the tendency of hybridization to its climax (see Santaella 2007b).

3. Locative Media

The Mciclopedia of new media defines locative media as location-based technologies, i.e. wireless technologies, technologies for monitoring, tracking and positioning that allow information to be linked to geographic areas. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most familiar technology that makes use of location-sensitive computing. Two dozen satellites orbiting 12 thousand miles away from the Earth’s surface help drivers and wanderers to virtually find their paths anywhere on earth. In addition to GPSs, some other devices that make up the mesh of locative media technology include: cell phones, wireless laptops, Bluetooth, wireless networks, radio frequency identification and so on and so forth. These devices allow people to find themselves and others in geographic space, and to connect that information to geographical positions. These technologies of mobility are location-sensitive, providing ever-broader access to the Internet, and allowing information to be stored and retrieved from remote databases.

The practices that these technologies enable are many and growing. Locative media’s field of operations functions as a kind of live map that charts the contradictions that plague turbo-capitalist societies. At one extreme, they begin with the military and government tracking that is allowed via new control systems that make use of these operations, opening the door to an era of discrete and ubiquitous surveillance. Therefore, as we are reminded by Lemos (2008), when we talk about locative media, the issues that must be addressed are not confined to communication or urbanism, but reach into political issues “related to new forms of monitoring, surveillance and control of urban space and of social mobility, since everything/everyone will have a tag, an electronic crawler, transforming city spaces in clouds of data” (p. 216).

Yet locative media are increasingly being used for purposes that have nothing to do with evil, but instead work for the betterment of industry and trade in the form of locally-based services. These first-generation applications still offer no more than a variation of ways to search for a restaurant, directions to a building, etc. Well-known car navigation systems still belong to this first generation. However, much effort is being done in the creation of more complex applications. For example, engineers are working on creating appliances that are capable of detecting our own position in space, the position of objects and places that are nearby, and devices that are able to talk to other devices through new protocols, so that location becomes a new type of data to be applied to the Internet and the Web. In addition, new forms of spontaneous self-organization are emerging from the general public’s appropriation of mobile devices such as Bluetooth and SMS, whose functions are cheap and even free; these forms would likely not be possible otherwise.

Indeed, in its constructive collectivism, locative media stresses both the power and the boundaries of new forms of surveillance. It enables the deconstruction of the way that political operations use controlling technologies by introducing moments of distortion and uncertainty in its limits, or by providing open platforms that offer the chance to revert, multiply or refract one’s gaze. From this comes the potential to change the way that we perceive and interact with the world around us, as decentralized activities challenge the hierarchical structures of society.

Other prime examples of this deconstruction—occupying the extreme opposite pole from the aims of power and control—are found in media art projects using locative media. Artists have long shown their concern for locations, but the combination of current mobile devices with positioning technologies is opening a plethora of new ways for geographical space to be found and drawn, across a wide variety of spatial practices.

There is no doubt that plurality is the strongest characteristic of locative media. From an entanglement of possibilities, projects are emerging that, for example, exploit the edges of the geopolitical space of cities, allowing ordinary people to insert their own social knowledge into urban landscapes through geo designs. Other projects take a more objective documentary approach, looking to connect hidden meanings to places, rescuing collective memory from its impending loss. Widely known examples include the urban annotation projects that encourage people to post, on geographical locations, personal stories, thoughts, some information, calls to action—all shared between users. These notes can be posted virtually in a geographical area by using GPS coordinates to be received asynchronously by another user. Therefore, urban space is seeded with stories that can be accessed by a wide variety of people—tourists, new residents or former residents seeking to rediscover new spaces in their familiar territories.

As it was studied by Canclini (1989), hybridism is a constituent part of the DNA of South American cultures. In fact, it is certainly the hybrid nature of Brazilian culture and art that has encouraged the emergence of a number of mobile and locative media events. For example, the international art festival Vivo Arte.Mov sponsored by Vivo, a cell phone operator company, is already in its third yearly edition; in 2008, it took place simultaneously in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. Aiming at the production and critical survey of the so-called culture of mobility, the festival encourages the application of mobile devices to forms of exchange of knowledge, the access to information and art, and the inclusion of experiences in public spaces.

In its 2008 edition, the event emphasized the social displacements between art and technologies in such a way as to expand the notion of art and its spaces, places, and tools. New perspectives of distribution and sharing of Web information appeared in a series of interconnected events composed of lectures, exhibitions, microcinema, video for cell phones, and locative media.

Taking place in São Paulo, and also in its third yearly edition, is the International Art and Mobile Creativity Festival-Mobilefest. In 2006, it discussed the social, cultural, and aesthetic implications that mobile technologies (cell phones and handhelds) are promoting on a global scale. In 2007, by means of video conferences, the event occurred simultaneously in Brazil (São Paulo), England (University of Westminster), Holland (the Waag Society), and the United States (New York University – ITP). In 2008, the event opened the question of how mobile technologies may promote democracy, culture, art, ecology, education, health, and the third sector. It aimed at the contribution of mobile devices to digital inclusion by means of the generalization of knowledge and the possibilities of open interactions.

Sponsored by Motorola, the event Motomix 2007, under the title of “The City in Networks” took place in São Paulo. It combined a forum of lectures with a space of exhibition where scholars and artists were brought together in order to discuss topics such as liquid images, cities in flux, the new nomads, the city and the new media.

All these projects in Brazil and elsewhere that encounter invisible wires of cohesion—through the sharing of liquid images, the redemption of personal storytelling experiences, and the recovery of collective memory that goes against the mainstream of official stories—provide comprehensive frameworks for critical analysis, and foster socialization in emerging networks based on reciprocity and trust in collaborative communication for the construction of shared knowledge.

This pluralistic ecology, united by the forces of Eros, seems to encourage the re-working of pessimist, monolithic theories that have shrouded cyberspace and cyberculture with black premonitions about the obsolescence of the body, the collapse of geographic areas and the inexorable loss of meaning in the pathways of life. The emergence of hybrid, pluralistic and multifaceted communication processes, which bring back the presence of the body in space and time in a new intermingling of physical and virtual worlds, is challenging us to invent new and more adequate theories for facing the unexpected horizons that other traditional and recent critical communication theories were not able to foresee.

References

Bhabha, H. K. (1998). The location of culture. London: Routledge.

Benedikt, M. (1993). Introducción. In M. Benedikt (Ed.), P. A. Gonzáles Caver (Trans.), Ciberespacio. Los primeros pasos (9-29). México: CONACYT/Sirius Mexicana.

Canclini, N. G. (1989). Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico: Grijalbo.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. London: Harper Collins.

Lemos, A. (2008). Mídias locativas e territórios informacionais. In L. Santaella & P. Arantes (Eds.), Estéticas tecnológicas. Novos modos de sentir (207-230). São Paulo: Educ.

Novac, M. (1993). Arquitecturas líquidas en el ciberespacio. In M. Benedikt (Ed.), P. A. Gonzáles Caver (Trans.), Ciberespacio. Los primeros pasos (207-234). México: CONACYT/Sirius Mexicana.

Santaella, L. (2007a). Linguagens líquidas na era da mobilidade. São Paulo: Paulus.

Santaella, L. (2007b). White does not matter in fuzzy cultures. Athanor 17(10), 165-171.

Smith, B. (2003). The ecological approach to information processing. In K. Nyíri (Ed.), Mobile learning: Essays on philosophy, psychology and education (17-24). Vienna: Passagen Verlag.

Souza e Silva, A. (2006). Do ciber ao híbrido: Tecnologias móveis como interfaces de espaços híbridos. In D. C. Araújo (Ed.), Imagem (Ir) realidade. Comunicação e cibermídia (21-51). Porto Alegre: Sulinas.

Biography

Lucia Santaella is Director of the Post-Graduate program in Technologies of Intelligence and Digital Design, Sao Paulo Catholic University.

Mobility and Distributed Surveillance

Surveillance and mobility have historically maintained close relations: the demarcation of borders and territorial protections, the control of migration and the flow of people, goods, diseases etc. all represent ancient lineages of the intersections between these two processes (Salter & Zureik, 2005; Foucault, 2007). An initial historical glance seems to show that surveillance practices and techniques usually operate so as to refrain mobility. The relatively static and paralyzing forces of surveillance, with its territorial controls, spatial examination and inspection of the flow of people, goods etc. seems to be opposed to the deterritorializing and relatively unpredictable forces of mobility, which pose a risk to social order (Adey, 2004). However, a careful examination reveals another relationship between surveillance and mobility which does not exclude the previous one, but rather overlaps it. Especially since the constitution of modern cities and states, surveillance devices haven’t simply opposed the many forms of mobility; in fact, they have followed and ordered them – not only to restrain and paralyze these movements, but also to capitalize on them and manage their potentialities. This is particularly visible in the urbanization processes since the 18th century, whose surveillance and safety devices (establishment of police systems, health policies and population management etc.) aimed at setting limits, borders and locations, as well as enabling and guaranteeing the flow of people, goods, air etc. (Foucault, op.cit.).

This double relationship between surveillance and mobility is emphasized and complicated in the contemporary world in which, on the one hand, there is a magnification of the mobility of individuals, populations, information, communication, goods, business etc., and on the other hand, there is the ongoing proliferation and diversification of monitoring, surveillance and control of this mobility (Lyon, 2002). The dissemination of mobile communication technologies (cellular phones, laptops, palmtops), pervasive computing and informational geolocation systems (GIS, GPS)² is central to the growing entrenchment of surveillance and mobility. This is especially true once such technologies – even though they are not specifically designed to perform surveillance – include monitoring systems for actions, information, behavior and communication of their users within their very machinery. In this context, mobility, which could in certain cases be a way to escape or violate surveillance, becomes its privileged means: being in movement or being mobile often means being subject to surveillance and monitoring, since there is no longer a material, spatial, temporal or informational distance interposed between the surveillance/monitoring system and the watched object/subject. Yet this condition does not necessarily imply, as is typically cited, the consolidation of a hyper-panoptic society in which surveillance is absolute. Considering the pervasiveness of these technologies in everyday life and the role of safety and terror in post-9/11 discourse, several authors have diagnosed a hypertrophy of the panoptic device in current surveillance societies (Gandy, 1993; Poster, 1990). Suggesting that it is chiefly an intensification of this device means missing something essential: the changes, not only in the intensity of the surveillance, but in its mode of operation, which is in several aspects set apart from the panoptic model. An extensive discussion on ruptures and continuities of such a model has been produced in the scope of the surveillance studies (Bogard, 1996; Marx, 2002; Lianos, 2001), and the intention here is not to revise it. The point is to analyze a few elements in the relationship between mobility and surveillance in Brazil, in order to distinguish certain specificities in the present operational mode of surveillance in this context.

The inclusion of video surveillance in contemporary urban landscapes is a global process, widely instituted in several countries. In Brazil, even though we are familiar with video surveillance in private and semipublic spaces, we are witnessing the beginning of their presence in public areas of free access. The social, political and subjective implications of this process cannot yet be completely apprehended, and we draw from relatively little research on the topic. In this article, I limit myself to only a few aspects of the relationship between video surveillance and mobility in Brazilian urban contexts. In order to do so, I refer to data collected in interviews performed with the parties responsible for the installation and monitoring of surveillance cameras in public thoroughfares,³ as well as research carried out in the period of a year (August 2007 to August 2008) on Brazilian news websites available on the internet. The data produced in these studies forms the basis for this article’s analytical work, which highlights the processes of the contemporary distributed surveillance model in terms of its contrast with the panoptic model. This analysis emphasizes the tensions and ambiguities of the visibility and mobility control regime, characteristic of video surveillance in Brazilian urban public spaces.

I suggest the expression distributed surveillance to denote the general state of surveillance in contemporary societies. Generally speaking, it is surveillance that has tended to become more ubiquitous and embedded in several technology devices, services and places that we use or attend every day, but performed in a decentralized fashion, non-hierarchically and for several purposes, functions and meanings in different sectors: in safety measures and in the coordination of the flow of people, information and goods; in consumption practices and marketing strategies; in communication means and modes, entertainment and sociability; and in the rendering of services etc. Thence derives a multiplicity of present or potential objects of surveillance that are not limited to, nor justified by, suspicious, bandit or allegedly dangerous groups, but which can actually include everyone or anyone – consumers, passers-by, internauts, criminals, reality show members etc. In the midst of this kind of surveillance for all, there are several possible foci, because the present devices that constitute this distributed surveillance regime do not watch or monitor only individuals or groups, but also information, electronic transactions, behaviors and habits in the information space, displacements, communications, traces in the cyberspace, flows of anonymous bodies in urban areas etc. Indeed, the affections and subjective and social significations that surveillance puts in motion today are diverse; if on the one hand, it is justified or carried out by the fear or the promise of safety and protection, it also on the other hand, affords fun, pleasure and sociability, as reality shows, image sharing websites, micro blogs and social networks reveal every day.

Referring to distributed surveillance is, therefore, not the same as referring to total or panoptic surveillance. Apparently, it is not a simple matter of expanding the existing models, it is rather another arrangement of practices and devices in which surveillance becomes a process diffused among multiple actors, techniques, functions, contexts, purposes, affections, etc. Note that the intention in this process is not to cease or restrain mobility, but to guide, conduct, capitalize and potentialize it in certain directions. If the focus and the devices intrinsic to surveillance tend to become more mobile, mobility is no longer simply the controversy or the danger that disturbs ordered spaces under watch, rather, it is what should be guaranteed and secured by surveillance.

This concept of distributed surveillance will be the background for the analysis of the recent and growing presence of video surveillance in public spaces of free access in Brazilian cities. I will highlight, in this context, aspects of a visibility and mobility control regime in which the monitored spaces and displacement of bodies are increasingly associated with safety, while immobility is seen as a threat and a source of suspicion. I will also observe how two different kinds of control of mobility by video surveillance coexist and nourish each other: the first aims at guaranteeing and stimulating free flows, under surveillance, of individuals and groups that are part of the services, consumption and work circles in the city; and the other aims at capturing and containing the mobility of poor and/or supposedly dangerous populations, removing them from these circles.

Video surveillance: visibility and mobility control regimes in Brazil

Let us start with the figures: in 2005 there were only 5 open street surveillance cameras in the city of Rio de Janeiro; in 2008 these cameras numbered 220, and their number was expected to reach 720 by the end of the year, representing a massive increase between 2005 and 2008 (a 144-times increase in this period).⁴ In the city of São Paulo, 96 streets were monitored in 2007; by the end of 2008, 369 streets are expected to be monitored with a total of 12,000 cameras in streets and public establishments (museums, schools, parks etc.) in the city.⁵ Other important Brazilian cities such as Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and Curitiba have shown a remarkable increase in their investments in video surveillance systems for public spaces since 2004 and 2005. In the Brazilian northeast, Fortaleza is the city that has the most ambitious project, calculating the installation of 250 new cameras by the end of the year 2008. Presently the public space is monitored by 35 cameras.⁶

These numbers offer a patent confirmation of the recent and significant increase of video surveillance in Brazilian public spaces, even if the absolute figures are low when compared to other cities in the world, such as London and New York.⁷ The reasons for such an increase in Brazil are multiple, spanning local and global contexts, and this paper does not intend to analyze them. We will only mention a few elements in the history of video surveillance in Brazil, so as to move on to the analysis of the implications for the mobility control in the large Brazilian cities.

The course of video surveillance in Brazil begins in the 80s, is intensified in the 90s, and as of 2003, surveillance becomes almost a synonym for safety (Kanashiro, 2008), appearing not only in private and semipublic sectors, but also in public spaces. As indicated by the figures shown, video surveillance systems in public areas of free access only began about four years ago in Brazil, and they have been enhanced significantly in the past two years. The State is responsible for the installation and monitoring of these systems, even if they are associated with the private sector in specific cases. A great part of the recent increase of this public investment comes from funds made possible by the National Program of Public Security and Citizenship (Pronasci⁸), introduced by the Ministry of Justice in 2007, in order to fight criminality in the country by combining security policies and chiefly preventive social actions. Even though the installation of surveillance cameras is not among the official projects of the program, several states have effectively directed the funds obtained for this purpose. Until recently, a great part of the investments in video surveillance fell under the scope of private security, a token of Brazilian reaction to violence in the cities. In 2002, for example, it was calculated that there were a million cameras installed in the State of São Paulo and a great part of them were meant for the protection of private or semipublic areas (Kanashiro, op.cit). Brazilian cities multiplied their “fortified enclaves” (Caldeira, 2000), which are “private, closed, monitored places meant for habitation, leisure, work and consumption” (Idem, p.12), and which keep “outside” those who do not participate in these circles or who represent some kind of threat to the functioning and safety of the enclaves and their inhabitants. The monitoring of surveillance cameras placed in public spaces is usually performed by offices responsible for public safety, even if in some cases the hiring of professionals is outsourced. The State supplements the growing revenues of the security industry, which in the last nine years have increased 13% per year in Brazil, according to ABESE.⁹ In 2007 the growth was 15% compared to the previous year,¹⁰ and in 2008 one of the most important companies in the field of video surveillance, Axis,¹¹ chose Brazil as the site of its main office of South American business. According to the security industries, the supposedly saturated European and North American markets point to countries such as Brazil, India, Russia and China as emerging markets for video surveillance.¹²

As for the relationship between video surveillance and mobility in Brazilian urban spaces, the first aspect to be noted, a technical one, is the progressive conversion of the wired closed circuit TV model – which is still technically and esthetically linked to delimited and relatively closed spaces – to the digital and wireless video surveillance – which is more adequate for monitoring urban mobility. Cities like São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Santa Catarina and Curitiba have invested in such digital and wireless systems with the transmission of data via internet, cellular phone or radio, allowing for greater mobility of monitoring actions and the devices themselves, as well as greater control over the flow of people in urban public spaces.¹³ Wireless video surveillance systems allow cameras to be repositioned more frequently and less expensively. They also enable the transition and monitoring of images via cell phone, or the installation of car cameras, which makes surveillance simultaneously more mobile and more capable of monitoring mobility. Besides proving to be the “ideal” for public networks of urban space monitoring – as reinforced by its low cost compared to analogical and wired systems – digital and wireless video surveillance also embodies the “technical solution” to the distribution of video surveillance among individuals who wish to monitor their own real estate, business, employees, relatives, children, etc. In Brazil, the IP cameras, which enable monitoring via internet, are heralded as the technology that will bring surveillance to everyone, amplifying the personalized use of video surveillance in households, workplaces and other sites.

In addition to this technical aspect, I would like to consider some of the aspects of the visibility and mobility control regime present in the incorporation of video surveillance systems in public urban spaces in Brazil. The most prevalent facet of this process is the progressive consolidation of a security discourse that promotes an associative identity between video surveillance and safe mobility. Such discourse is particularly visible in newspaper texts that report surveillance camera installation in Brazil. Research carried out with Brazilian news websites observed that 98.3% of the articles reporting on the installation of video surveillance systems in public spaces of free access used the idea of safety as a main legitimating framework.¹⁴ In these articles, the increase in video surveillance is practically synonymous with an increase in safety – in this context understood as the reduction of the amount of contraventions and the arrest of contraveners. Only 3.39% of the articles approach the inefficiency of the surveillance cameras used to reduce crimes, which is noteworthy, since recent statistics in several countries indicate that there is no evidence for the efficiency of video surveillance in the fight against criminality (Gill & Spriggs, 2005).

However, the journalistic discourse and its security rhetoric neither make explicit nor question how the cameras’ mobility is targeted at a part of the population considered “virtual victims” (Vaz et al., 2006) – victims of another significant part of the population, to whom the camera is not a safety and protection device, but a means of exclusion and suspicion. Still in the journalistic scope, Vaz et al. show how recent articles dealing with criminality in the city of Rio de Janeiro prioritize the suffering of victims, multiplying statements from the victims themselves, or from relatives and friends, while seldom mentioning the social causes for crime or the suffering of criminals. Thus, readers are identified as potential or virtual victims of crimes that, according to the discourse, are characterized by randomness and irrationality, implying the shadowy existence of barbarians among the elite, for whom there is no other option but to seek more protection and safety. In this context, surveillance cameras in public spaces of free access are justified as a way to guarantee that the classes who used to be protected behind walls and condos and shopping mall barriers have safe mobility in the streets of the city. The cameras exert a dissuasive effect, according to the discourse that legitimates them, pushing crime away from monitored zones and allowing for the instant capture and arrest of criminals in action, since they are monitored in real time. It can be noted that, if on the one hand, cameras in public spaces guarantee the mobility of citizens that have free access to consumption and civility circles, extending their “safe” mobility beyond their “fortified enclaves”, then on the other hand, they contribute to gentrification processes, displacing from monitored and watched areas a whole other part of the population, whose mobility is seen as threatening, and demanding control and restriction. This aspect becomes clearer when the installation of surveillance cameras is part of government-sponsored revitalization or reurbanization projects in decaying or abandoned areas. Research carried out at Parque da Luz in the city of São Paulo (Kanashiro, 2008) – a region until recently inhabited mainly by a poor population, drug users, prostitutes and beggars – points out how the revitalization of the area and the use of surveillance cameras comprised a policy to make these groups disappear.

It should be noted how social significance and forms of control operated by the incorporation of surveillance cameras in public spaces in Brazilian cities involve a visibility and mobility regime marked by ambiguities and tensions. This regime embodies the global model of surveillance for all, since video surveillance, when consolidated in public spaces of free access, is not directed to previously defined groups. In contrast to modern inspection devices, which observe a set of predefined individuals whose presence is related to the institution that watched them (prisoners, diseased), street surveillance cameras in streets, public parks etc. are directed at everyone and anyone, performing a dissuasive or “preventive” duty. The people in this case do not have an individual – nor a collective – identity that justifies surveillance. The chance of passing by the same inspected area is the only fact that links the watched parties. In this respect, we all become victims and potential suspects. In some cases, the office in charge of performing surveillance becomes its own object, such as the police, who are also monitored by the body responsible for monitoring the public thoroughfare. A recent example of this process in the city of Rio de Janeiro is the installation of surveillance cameras in police vehicles responsible for the operations in poor communities (slums), known as caveirões. Such operations can be distinguished by significant violence. The cameras – monitored in real time by the Command and Control Center of the Public Safety Office – watch occasional violent actions of criminals and the police.

However, as we have seen, this visibility regime for all coexists with a clear distinction between the mobile masses, for whom surveillance goes with protection and security, and the masses whose mobility should be restrained and for whom surveillance implies suspicion and exclusion.¹⁵ Once again, this regime presents a significant distinction from the disciplinary and panoptic model, according to which the safety of cities and populations involves the surveillance of dangerous individuals in circumscribed spaces. Today, by contrast, safety entails the surveillance of victims, as well as potential suspects, creating a stronger indeterminacy between those two groups. In Brazil, however, this indeterminacy coordinates with a clear distinction between populations that are meant to have a safe and free mobility, and populations that become the target of suspicion in the areas of monitored mobility, since they do not fit the accepted image of the mobile “civilized” masses (Bauman, 1999). It is possible to state that, contrary to the panoptic model, today the elites feel they are virtual victims of poor and allegedly dangerous populations in the cities and they “request” surveillance in the interest of safety. The surveillance camera performs an ambiguous symbolic function: on the one hand, it is legitimated by a discourse that affirms the presence of danger and reason to be afraid, since a monitored place is allegedly a potentially dangerous place – if it weren’t, then there would be no need for the camera to be positioned there; on the other hand, it provides a symbolic impression of safety, as associated with visibility. The camera works this way under a certain logic that attempts to legitimate its presence in public spaces as a device which simultaneously presumes lack of safety and provides security.

This visibility and control regime also relies on a perception and attention regime, in which resting, slow and motionless bodies, or ruptures to regular mobility, become one of the privileged targets of suspicion and watchful eyes. Such a practice can be understood as stemming from one element of the attention processes of contemporary urban video surveillance, that which attempts to capture the exceptional or irregular. As such, cameras are not so much intended to establish normality among a deviant population (as in panoptic institutions), as they are deployed to capture the fractures in the current order. The human beings behind the camera and the software used to identify suspicious movements may perform this duty of capturing a rupture in normality, or they may even anticipate it. In most contemporary urban spaces, especially in public thoroughfares, the moving flow of bodies and objects constitute the regular and expected movement associated with the dynamics of consumption, work and the generally hectic lives of city-dwellers. There are a number of video surveillance software programs that can automatically detect stops and interruptions in body movements, as well as static objects, for a certain period of time in certain places, screening and highlighting suspicious situations for camera operators or safety offices.¹⁶ In Brazil, these software devices are still not employed in public thoroughfares, but a similar protocol guides the training of camera operators, as shown in a study by Kanashiro (2008) at Parque da Luz in the city of São Paulo. According to the author, the mass of passers-by and the rhythm of the movements comprise the attention field of operators, with sudden changes in direction and interruptions to flow signaling peril and irregularity. Even in spaces like public parks, bodies that are too still or “idle” are also suspicious, since they stand out from the expected mobility, and often they are bodies that according to the surveillance point of view should not be there – such as beggars, street kids, drunks and drug users. Thus, mobility converges with an architecture of normalization, and it is over the interruptions, fractures and discontinuities in its standard flow that the eyes behind the cameras watch, sounding the alarm based on attention regimes in monitored urban territories.

Notes

1. This article is the result of the research “Visibility, vigilance and subjectivity in the new information and communication technology”, supported by the CNPq (Grant for Productivity in Research, 2007-2010) .

2. GIS - Geographic information system. GPS - Global positioning system.

3. In Brazil, state or municipal Public Security Offices are responsible for installing and monitoring surveillance cameras in public areas, streets or pathways. However, there are possible partnerships with private companies. In this research, agents from six different Public Security Offices were interviewed, namely, from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre e Fortaleza. These are state capital cities which significantly increased their video-surveillance systems reach in public spaces in the last couple of years. The interviews were conducted from March to October 2008.

4. Information provided by the Safety Office of the State of Rio de Janeiro, in an interview granted in April 2008.

5. Information provided by the Safety Office of the State of São Paulo, in an interview granted in June 2008.

6. The information related to the statistical and technical characteristics of video surveillance cameras in public thoroughfare of free access in Brazilian cities mentioned in this article come from interviews carried out between March and October 2008 with offices responsible for video surveillance in Public Safety Offices of States and/or Cities, and research carried out on Brazilian news websites available on the internet from August 2007 to August 2008. The number of cameras referred to here are restricted to those used for public safety, and installed in free access areas (the traffic monitoring cameras, for example, were not included in the count).

7. According to research carried out in 2004, there are about 4 million cameras in London, of which approximately 40,000 are used in public thoroughfares of free access (open-street CCTV). See Töpfer, E. & Hempel, L. (2004). CCTV in Europe: final report. Center for Technology and Society/Technical University of Berlin. Available at www.urbaneye.net. In New York, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union report (2006), there were approximately 4,468 cameras visible on street level in 2005.

8. www.mj.gov.br/pronasci/

9. Brazilian Association of Security Electronic Systems, http://www.abese.org.br/

10. Data provided by Abese: http://www.abese.org.br/

11. http://www.axis.com/

12. Data provided by Abese: http://www.abese.org.br/

13. Even though the progressive conversion of the analogical wired video surveillance model for the wireless digital model is clear, there are today several combinations of these models coexisting in Brazil. Regardless of the model used, most cameras installed in public thoroughfare as from 2005 have a 360 degree view, a 22x zoom and real time monitoring by the parties in charge of public safety in the Brazilian states and cities.

14. The research was carried out from August 2007 to August 2008 with Brazilian news websites. The news informing the installation of video surveillance systems in public spaces of free access were selected and analyzed in order to apprehend the legitimating elements of this process in the journalistic discourse.

15. Even if this is a dominant characteristic of the use of video surveillance in Brazil, several studies show similar processes in other countries. See Norris & Armstrong, 1999; Coleman, 2003; Botello, 2007.

16. These software programs are part of a new surveillance area - Intelligent Video Surveillance - which intends to automatically detect suspicious situations in captured images. Companies such as VideoIQ, Intuvision, Arinc, IntelliVid developed these software programs to provide safety in several sectors: transportation, commerce, leisure, etc.

References

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Biography

Fernanda Bruno is Associate professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) - Post graduation program in Communication and Culture. Researcher of the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development/ CNPq.

Mobile Media and Connections

Mobile communication studies have expanded from within various disciplinary areas (in sociology, communication, cyberculture and cultural studies, for example), instigated by they way that practices arising from the emergence of new digital mobile technologies¹ and wireless connections² give rise to new communications phenomena. These phenomena generate real research problems with questions that need to be addressed in order to identify and understand the economic and socio-cultural implications of mobile technologies for contemporary life.

In particular, this article aims to understand how mobile devices interface with journalism to offer potential changes to journalistic practice, newsroom culture, the production process and content production, all within an environment of convergence, multiplicity of supports and expanded mobility.³ The computational miniaturization that has resulted in the portability of communication devices, characterized by their ubiquitous connectivity, leads us to think about physical and informational mobilities (Lemos, 2007a; Sheller & Urry, 2006)—especially as they are embedded in the interactions between urban space and new processes of journalistic production, consumption and information circulation. These mobilities are interconnected and reinforced with mobile communication technologies.

In the sense that it is used here, the concept of mobility can be understood as a connection between its physical/spatial (transport) and virtual/informational (media) aspects, as outlined by Lemos (2007a). This approaches the same idea put forward by Sheller and Urry (2006), which, on the other hand, expands these aspects to consider other categories such as transport, migration and tourism studies (physical mobility), as well as the Internet, media and mobile phone (informational mobility). Indeed, different ideas about mobility have been deployed within various historical periods and distinct areas of knowledge, with varied applications. For our object of discussion, this concept can be situated in relation to the transition from mass means of communication to present articulations of new media. For Jensen (2006) and Bauman (2001), flows and mobility are immersed in the practices of contemporary cities around networks and globalization.

And yet another effect – a particularly powerful one in combination with all of these – is to enhance the mobility of information producers and consumers. Increasingly, we can download whatever we want, wherever we want it, to portable wireless devices. Conversely, we can upload products that we create while on the move. This challenges the very idea of a fixed workplace (Mitchell, 2003, p. 84).

In their analysis of the inter-relationship between technology and mobility, Dourish, Anderson and Nafus (2007) understand that we should speak of mobilities in the plural, as a result of the various forms that mobility acquires in its relationship with computing and the city, particularly in terms of new dislocated experiences of the workplace. As the authors explain, “Computing is on the move. Mobile telephony, wireless networking, embedded computing and ubiquitous digital environments are manifestations of a broader pattern in which mobility plays an increasingly significant role in the computational experience” (Dourish et al., p. 1). For Nilsson, Nulden and Olsson (2001), mobility is a dimension of communications convergence, a stage in the process of the information industry’s evolution.

Therefore, thinking about mobility(ies) within journalism requires consideration of these new concepts related to the mobile devices and wireless connections that emerged in a significant form in the 1990s, together with the digitalization process. This is linked to computing, which has become more and more ubiquitous, pervasive, portable (Weiser, 1991; Dodge & Kitchin, 2007) and connected (Mitchell, 2003). Contextually, the introduction of new technologies in journalism is not something new. Current innovations lie in the way that information is processed through the capacity of digitalization, sharing, storing and distribution. In this sense, it is important to identify the informatization process in the newsrooms of the 1970s and 1980s (Masip, 2008) as a precursor for both incorporating modern technologies inside journalistic culture and introducing new ways of dealing with information sources and databases. The productive process as a whole was interconnected by local and remote networks, which created the possibility of constructing computer mediated reports.

At the beginning of the 21st century, with digital journalism establishing its place in media culture, scholarly attention has turned toward the impact of new technologies on journalism in general. As described by Pavlik (2001) and expanded in other theoretical writing (Deuze, 2003; Palacios, 2003), some of the implications of this new media include changes to news content, shifts in the way that journalists work, restructuring of newsrooms and redefinitions of the relationship between journalists, the public and media organizations. The transformation of the newsrooms and the profession with technological innovation (Paterson & Domingo, 2008; Deuze, 2008)—resulting from the journalistic convergence process, characterized by the fusion of telecommunications, computing and mobile devices—causes “simultaneous convergence processes in the business, professional and content sphere” (Salaverría & Avilés, 2008). Convergence is a key process to discuss in relation to journalism, particularly in terms of those intersections between TV-internet-mobile-radio-print media that are predicated upon new distribution formats, digitalization and business models that take advantage of niche markets (Anderson, 2006).

These changes have further intensified with the recent introduction of mobile platforms in a journalistic context, expanding the capacity for mobility, and thus enabling the production and consumption of news remotely and while on the move. In essence, the news producer and consumer are afforded the potential to be in a state of movement—in both its physical and informational aspects—due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of connected digital mobile technologies.⁴

In attempting to analyze this phenomenon, a number of questions can be raised that interrogate its possible consequences and implications. How has the introduction of digital mobile technologies connected in a wireless network interfered in the news production process in journalism? What are the modifications in news production routines, considering mobility expansion and deadline compression with “always on”? Which new news formats can emerge from the connection between digital mobile technologies and Web 2.0 applications?

As a working hypothesis, it is understood that these technologies work to reconfigure journalism primarily in terms of modifying reporters’ deadlines (Paul, 2008; Paterson, 2008). The demand for continuous updates from the field is a result of always being “on”, especially in critical coverage situations of great repercussion where journalists need to feed their audience’s anxiety for up-to-the-minute news (Schneider, 2007). Secondly, the production process also transforms in the context of a mobile environment that enables ubiquitous access and production, allowing instant publication via portable devices connected to wireless networks. This character of immediatism forms part of the nature of journalism itself from its earliest existence as a social and communicational phenomenon. With mobile technologies, the news incorporates this instantaneity in a more insistent form (Canavilhas, 2007).

In the same way, the emergence of both Web 2.0 applications and mobile technologies favours a stronger connection between mass media such as television and these new devices, generating new formats where news gets integrated in an interactive multimedia platform that includes television, microblogging, mobile blogging, live streaming, mobile communication and collaborative networks. In this situation, the news narrative takes various formats into consideration in its structurization, causing the emergence of a type of hybrid news narrative.

When analysing the Brazilian setting, this expansion of news production and consumption stems from the adoption of third generation technology (3G)⁵ since November 2007, which has been appropriated by communication conglomerates in a practice called “mobile journalism”.⁶ We understand this practice as leveraging the relationship between journalism and mobility. In this context, the introduction of high speed 3G networks and other portable devices enabled mobile platforms to serve as a complement or counterpoint to the limited reach of Wi-Fi⁷ networks via hotspot⁸ coverage.

As in the majority of countries around the world, the mobile phone is an important communication product in Brazil, with more than 140 million phones in operation. These are divided between 81.09% pre- and 18.91% post-paid—in accordance with the ANATEL (2008) regulations—for a population of approximately 180 million inhabitants, as reported by the IBGE (2008). In this sense, the mobile phone works to develop various practices in urban space, such as production, consumption or circulation of information, due to its portability, connectivity and mobility: “The mobile phone enables communication free from physical connections, unfettered by wires and cables” (Hemment, 2005). With the convergence of functions embedded in the phone, such as photo, video, web browser, editor and text visualiser in various formats, 3G connections, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max, the mobile phone or the group of mobile technologies constitute a hybrid multimedia device—an ideal platform for journalistic practice (Lemos, 2007b; Levinson, 2004; McMullan & Richardson, 2006). The expanded mobility context that these platforms introduce is further extended by Brazil’s current digital TV model, which like the model in place in Japan, allows mobile access for equipment such as phones, improving the quality of that access.

Mobile communication has in fact established itself as a key disseminator of mediated practices, in the context of different types of mobility that mark an advanced form of cyberculture (Santaella, 2008; Beilgueman, 2006). Mobile technology’s multiple implications for urban space, journalistic practice and art have been addressed by research in locative media (Lemos, 2007a; Brunet, 2008; Bleecker & Knowlton, 2006; Santaella, 2008), mobile journalism (Briggs, 2007; Silva, 2008, 2009; Carmo, 2008; Quinn, 2002, Pavlik, 2001; Ahrens, 2006), smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002), socio-political processes (Gergen, 2008), cultural studies (Goggin, 2008), aspects of social transformation (Katz, 2008; Castells, Fernández-Andèvol, Qiu & Sey, 2006) and citizen journalism or collaborative journalism (Gilmmor, 2005; Bruns, 2005). These studies provide a panoramic view of the various facets introduced by mobile media on mobile phones, and other portable devices with multimedia characteristics.

In summary, we are faced with new practices that come close to what Castells et al. (2006) define as a mobile network society, around which all of these triggered perspectives have orbited in a more ubiquitous form since the beginning of the 21st century. This pervasiveness can be attributed to recent developments in the formatting of the Web 2.0 structure, mobile platforms and wireless, Bluetooth, infra-red, 3G and WiMax connections. As we have pointed out, mobile communication establishes new challenges for studying and observing experiences with the use of these digital technologies. It is particularly crucial to analyse the development and implications of mobiles across various spheres, principally in contemporary mediated landscapes. In the following section, we will demonstrate how this union of factors overlaps with the Brazilian media conglomerates’ negotiation between “old” and “new” media, within the specific context of journalism.

Mobility, 3G Broadband and Reporting: Brazilian Experiences

In this section we will investigate some specific journalistic applications of new digital mobile technologies in the Brazilian setting. Communication groups use Web 2.0 applications such as Qik, Cover It Live, Mogulus, Twitter, Flickr and 3G mobile phones for reports, interviews and live coverage, thus shaping the field of live streaming and interaction between post-mass⁹ and mass media. Or, in other words: these new applications are consecrated in the union between mobile technologies and Web 2.0. For Pardo Kuklinski, Brandt and Puerta (2008) the convergence of mobile devices and Web 2.0 applications suggests the emergence of mobile Web 2.0 as a migration of desktop platform functionalities to portable devices, with an “always on” connection that generates new consumption and content production classifications.

Journalism, within a broad historical context, was constructed through technology; the profession looked to mobility and instantaneity for producing and broadcasting news. These frontiers intersect in a more ubiquitous form in the present day, with the availability of a mobile environment to conduct reports in a remote form, through structures formed by digital mobile technologies and 3G broadband connections (Briggs, 2007; Srivastava, 2008; Pardo Kuklinski et al., 2008, Pellanda, 2005).

In order to understand how these relationships between journalism and mobility take place, we will describe some cases that incorporate the mobile structure in Brazilian journalism—covering a number of television networks and digital journalism sites within medium and large media conglomerates. These include the television networks Band, Globo, Cultura and Jornal, news sites JC Online and NH Jornal Online and Época magazine from São Paulo.

Época magazine’s Urblog is an urban blog that covers everyday situations in the city of São Paulo through photos, videos, live transmissions and journalistic articles, posted directly from the investigation location in a fully mobile situation. The reporter uses a Nokia N95 mobile phone with Wi-Fi and 3G connections. The articles reflect ongoing interactions with urban space, occasionally identifying production locations using GPS-generated maps on board the mobile phone. This project demonstrates an emphasis on mobility (physical and informational), using mobile equipment that allows for instant news in various formats (text, image and audiovisual) and geolocalization situations as an integral part of the routine of production, consumption and content circulation (Silva, 2008; Aguado & Martínez, 2008).

Figure 1 - Urblog, which is a mobile urban blog where the reporter posts directly from a 3G mobile phone¹⁰

The Rede Globo, from the same communication group, has also had a mobile editorial team called “RJ-Móvel” in the local Rio de Janeiro TV news since 2007. It is equipped with notebooks, digital video cameras, mobile phones, editing stations and a transmission system via satellite that can transmit live from any part of the city, with the objective of offering reporters more mobility. In addition, the journalistic programme “Globo Universidade” from the same television broadcasting company uses Nokia N82 mobile phones for interviews and small reports.

As for journalism at TV Band, one of the most traditional networks, reporters run live transmissions using 3G mobile phones for news that demands more agility and less equipment to facilitate relocation and live appearances. This procedure was put into practice in May 2008 with a reporter in Parque Ibirapuera in the capital of São Paulo. Subsequently, through the “Repórter Celular” project, video-reports are shown daily of incidents and journalistic situations captured by mobile phone cameras in the streets of São Paulo.

Figure 2 - Live transmission on the TV Band journalism network using 3G mobile phones¹¹

Also following this trend for developing journalism through the use of mobile phones in high speed networks is the conglomerate Sistema Jornal from Commercio de Comunicação, in the city of Recife, Pernambuco, in the northeast region of Brazil. Both the local television network, TV Jornal, and the JC OnLine site have adjusted to this kind of mobile journalism. This includes the creation of news formats that join live coverage with mobile platforms, such as mobile phones and notebooks, as well as Web 2.0 applications like the microblogging system Twitter, image social network Flickr, Cover It Live and Qik for live transmissions. Qik is a mobile phone program that enables real-time video streaming; on the JC OnLine site, four mobile camera phones with the Qik application installed and Flickr and Cover It Live for chat interaction with internet users were used in the mayoral election in the State of Pernambuco in October 2008. In turn, TV Jornal was the first television broadcaster in the country to use 3G technology in November 2007, in the “Notícia Celular” project. Eight reporters and cameramen recorded videos on 5 megapixel mobile phones, capturing newsworthy situations such as fires, conflicts, accidents and transmitting them to the broadcaster, supporting the principle of instantaneous and ubiquitous news.

The notion of an “unplugged city” is also suggested by the practices of “Roda Viva,” the main interview programme on São Paulo’s TV Cultura. The programme, which has been transmitted on television for more than 20 years, started to adopt a greater interaction with viewers and content producers by inserting a web platform in 2008. This platform integrates simultaneous live transmission with three behind-the-scenes cameras, linked to the streaming applications Mogulus and Cover It Live. Three invited Twitter users post behind-the-scenes information and interviews directly from the programme using notebooks, while the public also takes part, sending in comments via Twitter from their computers, notebooks and mobile phones (using the tag #rodaviva).

A mobile report strategy was also adopted by NH Jornal Online in Novo Hamburgo, Rio Grande do Sul, in the south of the country, which carries out live reports using third generation technology. The first report of this type on the Brazilian news website took place in May 2008. Third generation Nokia N95 mobile phones and the American software Qik were used for transmissions . The concept of the site, linked to Grupo Sinos, is to adopt the practice of mobile journalism in real-time field reports to offer faster news and interview transmissions.

Yet Brazilian experiences with mobile phones as a production platform started even before the introduction of third generation networks. The “Repórter Celular” project emerged in 2005, through TV Alterosa in Belo Horizonte, in the State of Minas Gerais, in the southeast region of the country. The connection technology and transmission that reporters used at the time was GPRS, which required low data transfer rates in comparison with 3G, but facilitated the basic function of sending audio files, videos and photos from a distance. The JC OnLine site also started real-time transmissions for one of the main carnivals in Brazil in Recife-Olinda, Pernambuco in the same year. It also covered football matches and elections using mobile phones with GPRS connections, bluetooth and notebooks for sending images, videos and reports produced in the field.

Figure 3 - Transmission of the 2008 mayoral elections by JC OnLine by mobile phones¹²

In all of these examples of mobile journalism,¹³ the interaction between urban and Internet/digital space occurs in tandem with the integration of mass media—such as television—with post-mass media—such as Twitter, live blogging and live streaming—as operated through mobile technologies and the mobile Web. Additional empirical research is needed to furnish a more in-depth account of the new journalistic practices that have emerged since the introduction of these digital mobile technologies. Based on the afore-mentioned technologies, evidence of a reconfiguration in journalism is already apparent in its production process and in news consumption.

Conclusions

In this article we explore some Brazilian cases of mobile communication practices, from the perspective of “mobile journalism”. These case examples evidence a strong correlation between mass and post-mass media, which has facilitated changes in journalists’ production routines. An increased immediacy of deadlines follows from the reporters’ state of greater physical and informational mobility—as supported by permanent contact with cyberspace and with the editorial office through 3G and Wi-Fi connections. The portability of digital mobile hybrid devices, which enables them to even be carried in one’s pocket, only furthers the ubiquity of connectivity.

Consequently, these mobile wireless network technologies affect journalistic practice, modifying the news production routine. Understanding how and why the use of such tools transforms the news production process—including both inter-newsroom relationships and relationships with on-site production—is fundamental for defining this new communicational phenomenon. Our approach centred on discussing the introduction of these new technologies in Brazilian journalism, and it presented cases that can offer a clearer vision of mobile device uses and developing practices in the country. These results and experiences form part of the convergence process that characterizes new media communication, comprised of the multiplication of supports and digitalization of production, consumption and content sharing through telematic networks.

Notes

1. The following are understood as digital mobile technologies: smartphones, palmtops, notebooks, mini-laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, digital recorders and cameras and portable devices such as pen drives and the like.

2. Wireless connections are formed by Wi-Fi, WiMax, Bluetooth, infra-red and third generation technology (3G), which vary in coverage according to accordance with connection speed and reach.

3. In the article “US: Mobile Journalism is changing the newsroom”, from Editors’ Blogs, Jean Yves Chainon affirms that mobile journalism is having an impact on American editorial offices because digital mobile technologies, which are becoming much smaller, more powerful and hybrid, are responsible for keeping reporters in the field for longer durations—since they can investigate, film video and register images to send to the editorial offices or publish them direct on location. However, some editors are showing concern regarding the quality of news without appropriate supervision of reporters’ on site production.

4. Connected digital mobile technologies can be seen both as production platforms for journalists and access and consumption platforms for users on the move in urban space. With the improvement of device interfaces, the growing number of sites formatted for mobile phones alongside the equipment’s increased internal capacity in terms of multi-media resources, new production and consumption conditions are added to this set of possibilities.

5. Third generation technology is a high speed, broadband connection for mobile phones that facilitates Internet navigation and upload/download activities. Apart from its speed, 3G is marked by its multimedia capacity, especially in the case of devices with fitted cameras and an Internet browser. In an evolutionary context, first generation mobile phones are only equipped for vocal communication and second generation digital mobile phones incorporate simple data traffic such as SMS (Pardo Kuklinsk et al., 2008; Srivastava, 2008).

6. The concept of mobile journalism has not yet been theoretically defined. It is a phenomenon that still lacks enough scholarly support and empirical observation to crystallize its meaning and to identify its real implications for contemporary journalistic practice. However, this article attempts to reinforce the relationship between journalism and mobility through examining uses of digital mobile technologies and wireless connections and how they affect two basic situations: production and consumption of information while on the move. This case of consumption especially intersects with the mobile web, with handsets being used to access information in cyberspace and online databases in a ubiquitous way. Likewise in content production, particularly through various “always on” mobile platforms, the concept of mobile journalism addresses the integration of microblog and moblog updates or live streaming in new forms of journalistic production.

7. The Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) Cybercities Research Group at the PhD Program in Contemporary Communication and Culture in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, has been mapping city of Salvador hotspots since July 2007 and has identified that part of the Wi-Fi wireless network is centralized in hotels, malls, universities and commercial centres, with access restrictions for users on the move in urban space. In this sense, there are difficulties in finding open connections for Internet access. The project is called “Wi-Fi Salvador“, and it represents a pioneering effort in the country, aiming to develop modes of studying and characterizing new practices of wireless access in the respective hotspots within urban space.

8. It is necessary to emphasize that part of this emerging phenomenon in the Brazilian media around 3G is explained by the fact that the wireless infrastructure is still limited to and centralized in mall, airport and hotel hotspots. This circumscription is further reinforced by a policy of keeping networks closed by companies and users, as mentioned in the previous note. In the same way, the policy for installing Wi-Max networks is practically nonexistent in the country. 3G technology tends to be more far reaching and ubiquitous in Brazil, due to telephone operators’ coverage that is not restricted to closed environments and commercial centres.

9. Lemos (2007c) differentiates post-mass media from mass media (print media, television and radio) by the characteristic of digitalization, which defines the former, for instance in the Internet and its products—wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networks and mobile devices—that shape this environment and the possibility of circulating information without a filter or though mass communication means. The focus here is on the functions carried out by these media.

10. Available at http://urblog.com.br.

11. Available at http://jornalismomovel.blogspot.com/2008/04/
jornalismo-da-band-transmite-ao-vivo.html.

12. Available at http://www2.uol.com.br/JC/eleicoes_aovivo.

13. The most representative example of mobile journalism on an international scale was introduced by the news agency Reuters in October 2007 with creation of the “Reuters Mobile Journalism” project. Agency reporters spread throughout the world are using a kit comprising a Nokia N95 mobile phone, wireless bluetooth keyboard, external microphone for a higher quality recording during interviews, and tripod to assist in stabilizing images and videos recorded. Editing applications are also embedded in the mobile phone. The reporter produces reports in distinct formats (audio, video, image and text) with this kit, for distribution through various news agency platforms. This equipment offers more mobility, portability and ubiquity to reporters who can carry out their activities in real time, transmitting video through a 3G mobile phone via the Qik application (Fulton, 2007).

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Biography

Fernando Firmino da Silva is a professor at the Department of Social Communication at the State University of Paraíba, Brazil. He is a researcher in the PhD Program in Contemporary Communication and Culture at the Federal University of Bahia.

Over the last few years, the provision of wireless broadband internet access has become part of governmental agendas at all levels, and in many different locations (Middleton & Crow, 2008). This inclusion of yet another ‘new technology’ on the political agenda, however, belies its roots in an old problem and debate: uneven public access to society’s technological developments. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article XVII, states: “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (UN, 1948).

It is arguable that at this point in time local governments, and by this I mean municipalities working in tandem with state and federal agencies, have a key role to play in the provision of wireless internet, particularly in Brazil. If there is debate, then it should be about the parameters of that role: when and how should public servants and politicians step in?

In Brazil, the role of government in the provision of Wi-Fi services was catapulted to public attention in 2008. The Brazilian federal government issued an announcement on October 10, 2008 (Nº 027/2008-MC), which aimed at hiring the services and equipment needed to provide “the implementation of a basic broadband Internet access communications infrastructure in municipalities, using wireless technologies to transmit data, voice and images, in order to support teleconferences, telemedicine and teleclasses at the national level” (MC, 2008b). Essentially, the idea was to equip 160 cities with corporate, communitarian or peer-to-peer networks, or even to develop a mix of the three. The imperative behind the project was the creation of “digital cities”, an expression used in the call’s text itself.

In 2008, in Brazil’s most important industrial and financial centre of São Paulo city, Marta Suplicy, the Labour Party’s (Partido dos Trabalhadores) candidate for City Hall, promised broadband wireless internet for the whole municipality (PT, 2008). Despite having not been elected, Suplicy succeeded in provoking a debate about wireless networks, digital inclusion and related issues. To provide a context for Suplicy’s promise, São Paulo’s population of 10,886,518 people (as of 2007) inhabit a 1,523 km2 area (IBGE, 2008).

Both projects became targets of strong criticism and the federal government’s call was even cancelled by the end of October 2008. The lack of public debate before opening the call and the reliance on a sole technological model, that is, wireless technologies, were among the key objections. Despite the call’s cancelation, the government announced a public forum to debate the project – the date for which has yet to be set (MC, 2008a). Suplicy’s promise, in turn, garnered accusations of being unfeasible and driven only by political marketing.

What is clear is that broadband, wireless networks and digital cities have become central issues in Brazil at all levels of government. The hype surrounding broadband has produced some unusual outcomes. When he was Brazil’s Culture Minister in 2008, Gilberto Gil, who is a major Brazilian singer and Creative Commons advocate, even launched a new album and tour called Banda larga cordel, in English Broadband cordel (a cordel is a pamphlet). For a better understanding of the song’s title, see cordel literature at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordel_literature and the Brazilian Cordel Literature Academy at http://www.ablc.com.br.

Video: Gilberto Gil, Banda larga cordel, live in Piraí 2008

Here are some verses:

Quem não vem no cordel da banda larga
Whoever doesn’t join in the broadband cordel

Vai viver sem saber que mundo é o seu
Will live without knowing that the world is yours

And further in the song, Gil plays with the meanings of the word “banda”/“band,” which in Portuguese and English, indicates both a group of persons and a range of frequencies in radio transmission:

Ou se alarga essa banda e a banda anda
Either this band is broadened and the band moves

Mais ligeiro pras bandas do sertão
Quicker to the backlands’ bands [in the sense of a group of people]

Ou então não, não adianta nada
Or else, it doesn’t matter

Banda vai, banda fica abandonada
The band goes, the band stays by itself

Deixada para outra encarnação
Left for the next incarnation.

The song did not reach the top of the charts. And although it may carry a great deal of political marketing, as the composer was the Minister of Culture at the time, the lyrics captured some popular sentiment surrounding the key issue of digital inclusion.

While 2008 was an interesting and important year for public discussion of urban wireless networks in Brazil, the digital city debate in Brazil can be traced back to the mid 1990s. To understand the local history of these issues I will now briefly outline three well-known, pioneering cases in Brazil: Piraí, Sud Mennucci, and Tiradentes, located in three different parts of the country.

Back in the mid 1990s, in Piraí, the privatization of a Brazilian power company led to 1,200 job cuts among 22,500 habitants, and forced the municipality to rethink its local development plan. Among the many dreams and projects that were proposed, the community envisaged one key objective: in any and all cases it should go digital. The first infrastructure deployment, aimed at universal access goals, began in 2002. The goal was to provide an infrastructure capable of transmitting data, voice and image.

At first, the Piraí went totally wireless with a public fee for different bands ranging from 128 kbps to 512 kbps, with prices between R$ 39 and R$ 90. The cost of the network and a two-year legal dispute with Anatel, the Brazilian telecom regulatory agency, led the managers to opt, in 2007, for a free public hybrid infrastructure. At the centre of this infrastructure, 13 towers spread all over the city, operating at 5.8 Ghz, were extended by complementary cables that provided access to additional sites depending on geographical and architectural contingencies. After Anatel’s ruling, the provision of free internet had to be limited mostly to public facilities, including telecentres, kiosks, and a few hotspots and residences in low-income areas.

Video: “Bandalargar o Brasil” meeting, in Piraí-RJ, produced by Fábrica do Futuro in partinership with Cultura Digital

The second representative case in Brazil is Sud Mennucci, a small city in the North East of São Paulo state, with only 7,714 inhabitants, 85% of whom live in the urban area. The city covers an area of 591 km2 (IBGE, 2008; Okajima, 2007). Agribusiness and the cattle industry are the municipality’s main economic activities.

The first studies on the deployment of Sud Mennucci’s Muni-Wi project started in 2002. The initial motivation was the need for an Internet connection to supply municipal administrative demands in order to reduce the costs of an interurban dial-up connection. Initial studies were conducted by City Hall’s IT technicians and IT managers from the local alcohol industry. From this first evaluation, optical fibre and Wi-Fi appeared to be the best choice; the latter, however, was the cheaper solution.

In 2003, as the local government realized that there was more bandwidth than needed by administrative public services, the signal was opened to the community. The new goal was to bridge the digital divide, as interurban calls to regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were too costly for local residents. By September 2003, the city had 10 registered users. These were comprised of business and residential users, and did not include schools, libraries and other public facilities, which already had some form of access. In a turn of events that prompted an agenda-setting study, a 2005 article published in a national newspaper provided a crucial boost to the population’s interest in the network (Gaspari, 2005). Now, in 2008, almost a thousand residences and business offices are registered in this municipal network.

The residential and business wireless network uses Wi-Fi at 2.4 GHz, in a point-to-point network design, with 64 kbps access per point. Signals, from a 40 m antenna, reach a radius of 10 km (314 km2), but city managers claim to be ready to expand the networks with new cells. The internet link is provided by Telefônica. The population must acquire antennas from private stores, costing from R$ 200 to R$ 300, and have these installed on their houses or offices in order to access the municipal network. However, if someone is near to the central antenna or to an existing residential antenna, with no physical interference, he or she may have access to the network.

The last important case is that of Tiradentes, a small town in Minas Gerais state, with 6,547 inhabitants spread over 83 km2 (IBGE, 2008). In Brazil, the region is known for its historical architecture, which makes tourism and handicraft products some of its main economic activities alongside agribusiness. Tirandentes’s geography is full of hills and mountains, therefore presenting a particular challenge to wireless network deployment.
Thanks to a partnership between the municipality, the Brazilian Ministry of Communications and private companies such as Cisco, Telemar and Metasys, the city launched its project, Tiradentes Digital, in 2006. The federal government invested R$ 560,000, leaving executive functions to the Federal University of Ouro Preto (Gomes, 2006; MC, 2007).

Video: Tiradentes Digital

The official launch date of the Tiradentes Digital project was March 24, 2006. As of April 2008, aside from schools and public buildings, the city had a 0.5 km² Wi-Mesh public wireless network covering its tourist centre with five antennas, with 2,900 monthly logs. The goal is to expand the network, adding other 11 antennas and covering a 5 km² area. Users within the network access it freely at 2 Mbps 2.4 Ghz frequencies; only the backhaul operates at 5.8 Ghz. The project uses an internet link provided by Oi/Telemar, a major telecom company in Brazil. Since the network’s equipment was provided by Cisco, its software by Metasys, and its funding by the federal government, the municipality did not have to invest. The executive coordination, however, estimates that the cost of network deployment has reached up to R$ 200,000 and that the monthly costs to maintain it are around R$ 30,000, aside from human resources.

Tiradentes Digital faced some specific difficulties in rolling the project out:

1. presenting the project to the population, since many local political interests are at stake
2. developing a local ICT culture
3. creating a sustainable model
4. dealing with restrictive telecommunications legislation

The hurdles faced by Tiradentes are neither new nor exclusive. The entry of local governments in the provision of wireless internet is far from reaching a consensus around the world, and Brazil is no exception. Will the municipality be able to sustain the project in the long run? Will the project interfere with local-sector telecom development? Does the local government have what it takes to deploy and operate the network? Despite these lingering questions, recent developments in Brazil illustrate an eager optimism toward the establishment of so-called digital cities.

The three examples above, especially Piraí’s case, have set some degree of precedence for Anatel’s recent rulings. As the main regulatory body for Brazilian telecom, Anatel (National Telecommunications Agency) approved the creation of a Limited Private Service (LPS or SLP in Portuguese) license in 2007, aimed at covering Brazilian municipalities’ needs. The LPS licences demand free access for the population, restricted to municipal services and to the city’s territory. Local governments can also opt for a less restricted network and hire a private or public company with a Multimedia Communication Service license working under a market regime. Another regulatory move, under discussion at Anatel, is to clear the 450 MHz to 470 MHz band and make it available for more intense use in small or rural cities.

More recently, on November 3, 2008, Anatel launched a public consultation on the 3,400 MHz to 3,600 MHz bands’ regulatory marks. The original text proposes to use the subbands from 3,400 MHz to 3,405 MHz and from 3,500 MHz to 3,505 MHz for public digital inclusion projects. With Anatel’s efforts, but also despite some remaining regulatory, technological and possible economic restrictions, local governments across Brazil are launching their projects with more and more optimism. At times, projects are rolled out at state level, such as in Rio de Janeiro, Pará, Bahia or Amazonas states. and the dream of a digital city preoccupies a great number of politicians in Brazil. Not even bad news coming from cities in North America – for instance, Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia – reporting difficulties in maintaining their WiFi municipal networks, seems to slow down local ambitions in Brazil (Economist.com, 2007; Gardiner, 2007).

That the Internet’s future is wireless is fast becoming fact. The role of local governments in this business, however, remains an open question. As usual, good reasoning calls for a balance between public, market and organized civil society actions. More generally, when the market fails to meet citizens’ needs, governments should promote the creation of a new market or even offer solutions themselves. In regard to citizens’ access to digital technology, recent research indicates that in 2007 only 17% of the Brazilian population had home Internet access (CETIC.BR, 2007). Such figures should be more than enough to sustain arguments for municipal entry in this business and doubts concerning the municipalities’ participation in the provision of wireless internet should not prevent them from doing so in countries like Brazil.

The argument for municipal entry in the provision of wireless internet is rather simple. In the so-called “Knowledge Societies,” lack of broadband internet access constitutes part of any possible definition of poverty. In the very near future, this conception of broadband will be framed in terms of wireless broadband internet access. As George Santos precisely remarks, the definition of poverty is, above all, a political one and has to do with the goals a society sets to itself; it is not simply a matter of statistics (Santos, 1979). Although many factors influence poverty, connection to broadband internet seems to be a key issue for any given contemporary society. Since private broadband tends to be provided only where there is a market, that is, money, the government has a role to play in digital inclusion as mentioned earlier in this text, either by promoting the creation of new markets or by acting as an internet provider itself.

Traps, however, are spread across the terrain. Going totally public, which means free in Brazil according to Anatel’s ruling, may result in inhibiting the local telecom industry’s participation in projects and, consequently, the creation of new jobs in this sector. Critics also highlight the lack of technical expertise in many municipalities, the challenges concerning the network’s financial sustainability and upgrade in the long run, not to mention the possibility of slowing down innovation, which would benefit from market competition (Josgrilberg, 2008).

On the other hand, outsourcing a municipal network development or operation through public-private partnerships also carries its risks. The most serious of these threatens to put public values in danger – for instance, access universalization, freedom of access, etc - given existing private interests. In addition, the risk of getting tied up by contract to a single technological or management model could present a serious problem as wireless technologies evolve. Finally, public management may grow distant from the network’s performance, and might as a result, miss opportunities and social needs, and even take too long to identify problems (Josgrilberg, 2008).

One should note that in either case, going public or developing public-private partnerships, all potential risks are manageable. It is a matter of reaching the best balance between the government, the market and organized civil society according to contingent situations. Nonetheless in both cases the local government should be held responsible for the project (Minow, 2007).

In conclusion, what is crystal clear is that, in Brazil, promoting, securing and sustaining universal access to technology remains a key problem. This issue is an old one dating back to the UN’s 1948 declaration fashioned in the era of radio, television and the landline telephone, and in Brazil it predates the public consciousness of these debates in 2008: only the technical objects have changed. Wireless broadband internet represents yet another challenge to be faced by public managers, servants and politicians alike. Despite possible criticisms, one cannot afford to ignore the central role that local governments do have to play, either as catalysts or as promoters of market-based and civil society initiatives, or in developing and managing their own municipal networks.

References

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Biography

Dr. Fabio B. Josgrilberg is a lecturer and researcher at the Methodist University of São Paulo Graduate Social Communications Program, and a member of Wi-Journal of Mobile Media’s editorial board. His recent research includes the report, Muni-Wi: an exploratory comparative study of European and Brazilian municipal wireless networks, funded by São Paulo State Research Support Agency (FAPESP).

Low income communities and individuals in Brazil are now grasping the importance of the Internet. The boom in blogs and user-friendly databases worldwide have greatly expanded hypertextual writing and the production of news and information across the web. Even television programs disseminate news about the advantages and benefits of the World Wide Web, spurring Brazilians to take an interest in its potential. Yet the unequal concentration of income, and the poverty experienced by most of Brazil’s population, represents an enormous obstacle in the expansion of the Internet and its services in country.

Recent data reflects the large disparities in the country. According to the research conducted by IBGE (the Brazilian Geographic and Statistics Institute), in 2007, Brazil’s population reached 189 million inhabitants. At that time, there were still nearly 14.1 million illiterate people over the age of 15 in Brazil. The Gini (GINI) coefficient, which measures the unequal concentration of income, has been falling steadily since 2004 (when the index was 0.547), but in 2007 it reached 0.528. The percentage of shared households with any kind of telephone reached 77%, while 31.6% of these households had mobile phones only. The same study showed that 88.1% of households had radios, 94.5% televisions, 26.6% personal computers and only 20.2% had Internet access.¹

Communication costs in Brazil are one of the highest in the world. According to a study conducted by the Brazilian Association of Telecommunications Competitive Service Providers (TelComp), the megabit in Brazil reached a selling price of R$716.50 per month in 2007. The same megabit sold by Italian Tiscali was equivalent to R$4.36 per month. In France, Orange charged R$5.02, and in the U.S. one could possibly pay up to R$12.75. In Manaus – capital of the state of Amazonas – broadband connection cost 395 times more than in Tokyo, Japan.

In this paper I compare three models of Internet provision—the state-controlled model, the free-market model and the digital commons model. The latter is based on the idea of designating large areas of bandwidth “open” and publically available. I describe how the creation of free wireless connections in three small towns in Brazil exponentially increased the public use of information technology and Internet in locations where previously only dial-up services and low bandwidth connections were available. In Brazil, wireless networks have being used non-commercially and privately since 2000, particularly the Wi-Fi connection protocols 802.11A, 802.11B, 802.11G. However, a number of municipalities offer non-commercial and free wireless Internet connection. In this context, supporting the development of free Wi-Fi networks—maintained by municipalities—could create a healthy competition with the commercial services offered by telephone providers. Not only would this development lower costs, it would stand to initiate greater public access to the Internet for a wider range of people.

Just as the decrease in computer prices in Brazil—upon the implementation of the government program Connected PC—prompted a growth in computer sales, one could presume that the elimination or reduction of telecommunication costs in Brazil could enormously increase network usage. The pressure generated by free Wi-Fi connections, with its cheap technology and widely distributed signal in the cities, could improve the quality of paid services and cause a drop in connection prices.

Clouds of open connection in three cities

While other examples of the failures and successes in municipal Wi-Fi networks exist nationally and internationally, I focus here on three small Brazilian cities that now provide free Internet access for their populations: Quissamã, in the state of Rio de Janeiro; Sud Mennucci, in the state of São Paulo; and Tapira, in the state of Minas Gerais. In Quissamã, 17,376 people live in an area of 716 km². In Sud Mennucci, there are 7,714 inhabitants in an area of 591 km². Finally, Tapira’s population has reached 3,509 people within an area of 1,184 km². The three cities all provide wireless signal to 100% of their respective areas: since 2004 Quissamã has offered connection speeds of 128 kbps to individuals and 256 kbps to businesses; Sud Mennucci has ensured 256 kbps to everybody since 2003; and Tapira has provided more than 64 kbps to all of the population since 2004.

The costs of Internet provision were very different in these three cities. The city of Sud Menucci spent R$18,000 to implement the project and R$70,000 to enlarge its wireless network speed, security and stability. On the other hand, the city of Tapira spent R$5,000 in equipment and antennas for connection infrastructure. The implementation and maintenance expenditures in Quissamã have not been published. The monthly connection cost paid by Sud Mennucci to the telecommunication provider is R$5,800. Tapira pays R$7,900 per month for its Internet signal. Quissamã and Sud Mennucci websites use Linux servers and Apache web servers through Netcraft. Free Flos² software is used in these cities’ networks. In Quissamã telecommunications centers—places for public free access to the Internet on desktops computers—are maintained by the city and utilize GNU/Linux platforms on their machines.

After the implementation of free wireless access services in these three cities, the number of Internet users soared quickly. The number of homes with Internet connection in Tapira increased six-fold compared to its original number. In Quissamã, this number grew eight times larger and Sud Mennucci experienced an astonishing growth of twenty-eight times greater Internet access. The following chart summarizes this growth:

Source: city reports available at www.guiadascidadesdigitais.com.br

* Estimate based on the number of computers in each city. Since in Tapira there were only 50 computers, the best case scenario would be that all 50 households would have Internet access, which is very unlikely.

These statistics are telling if one compares them to the rate of overall Internet growth in Brazil. The speed of growth in connected homes in these cities is much larger than the general market numbers if we consider the national average connection growth, registered in research conducted by the Internet Management Committee in Brazil. The average number of households with Internet access in Brazil jumped from 14.49% in 2006 to 17% in 2007. Tapira, with the lowest average out the three cities observed, grew 50% within less than three years of accessibility.

The open spectrum potential

Electromagnetic spectrum is a valuable public resource whose regulation is of extreme importance. In Brazil, radio frequency spectrum is controlled by the State and only can be used according to the Brazilian Frequency Range, Destination and Distribution Plan (PDFF). The National Telecommunication Agency (Anatel) is in charge of managing radio spectrum usage, regulating and monitoring its uses. As a result, each radio range is set for a specific application or service, according to what the Plan outlines. This plan was recently changed to incorporate the implementation of digital television in Brazil.

On June 29, 2006, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, signed Decree 5.820,³ which defined the rules for implementing the Brazilian System of Terrestrial Digital Television (SBTVD-T) and the transmission and retransmission platform of sound and image signal broadcasting. The Decree re-organizes the allocation of Brazilian radio spectrum. According to the Decree, the transition period from the analog transmission system to SBTVD-T will last ten years, and during this transition period, programming will be broadcast using both analog and digital technologies. The channels used for analog transmission in the electromagnetic spectrum frequency ranges from 54 to 88 MHz (channels form 2 to 6) and from 174 to 216 MHz (channels 7 to 13); these will be returned to the federal Union after the transition period.

During the next few years, Brazil will discuss what must be done with the frequencies that will be freed up once the analog TV transmissions end. There is the exciting possibility of establishing a plurality of uses for them. Some groups in civil society, such as Intervozes, ASL, and Além das Redes, advocate for a more open spectrum model, a proposal that maintains that these frequencies should be available for common use. As I have argued elsewhere:

The digital transmission unit controlled by software can scan or sweep the spectrum searching for the best frequency for sending waves at any given time. Similarly, digital receptor units can constantly scan the spectrum to tune to a specific channel, even when its frequency changes. Therefore, the spectrum should not be turned into the private property of some people. It should be transformed into a common space. A path that many can pass by and transmit signals, respects the standards of public interest (Silveira, 2007, p. 50).

There are some who argue that such a model, based on municipal needs and the provision of publically accessible swathes of bandwidth, is untenable. The justification here is that state control of spectrum is necessary because radio frequencies are limited, scarce resources. For this reason, the federation states tend to advocate for the use of an exploration model, based on concessions and permissions that will be sold to the private sector, generally through bandwidth auctions—a model that has been used in other nations such as the United States and Canada. This model, in which the state sells off bandwidth to commercial brokers, is purported to be the best way to avoid the so-called “tragedy of the commons” or the inefficient use of a resource caused by its excessive chaotic or disorderly use. However, many researchers consider the state control of spectrum, and its sale to commercial enterprises, to be governed by other motivations. As Hazlett remarked on the regulation of radio frequencies in the United States: “Policy makers in the 1920s were not driven to public interest allocation of radio spectrum by airwave chaos. Just the opposite; chaos was strategically used to procure public interest allocation.” (p. 95).

Such fears are unwarranted in the digital era. Digital technologies arguably allow for a more intelligent and efficient use of spectrum, neutralizing possible glitches or chaos as a moot point. Digital transmitters and receivers, software-defined radio, and smart radio can overcome the restrictions and interference of the analog world. There are existing examples of technologies that utilize the same radio frequency by many users at the same time. For example, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technologies allow several cell phones to function at the same time, within the same frequency, with no interferences between them, because of their coded signals. As Kevin Werbach suggests, the digital division of these frequencies ensures that,

the capacity of the system to transmit useful information increases. The same spectrum can hold more communications. The intelligence of devices is substituting for brute-force capacity between them. Imagine what highways would be like if cars couldn’t be steered quickly to avoid collisions and slowdowns. There would have to be huge buffers between each vehicle to prevent accidents… precisely what exists in the spectrum today. (2003, p.19)

Technically-speaking, the channels utilized for analog television transmission that will be returned to the Union could become be available to society for digital transmission. These excellent quality channels and frequency ranges, based on the direct access to radio spectrum, could provide a common way for communities, municipalities, and different groups to ensure cultural diversity through an effective means of implementing their right to communication.

Conclusion

In the context of present-day Brazil, there are three possible ways to provide public access to the radio spectrum that is opening up: issuing state-controlled concessions; privatizing the creation of secondary spectrum markets; or following a ‘digital commons’ model of open spectrum allocation. The current model, based on state control, is inefficient and it gives too much power to controllers of telecommunication infrastructure, who retain the exclusive right to the spectrum range. The privatized spectrum model treats spectrum like any private good or commodity. Radio frequencies would be sold by the state to private agents that could use them in the most profitable possible way, including selling or leasing them to secondary markets. This model of spectrum privatization will only worsen the problems of access in the context of Brazil.

The third option, an open spectrum model, is based on the notion of spectrum as a public resource that needs to be thought of as a commons. Working towards a policy of open spectrum is a way to guarantee that everyone in a particular area has access to both frequencies and public connections. In this model, the state would define the technical rules to ensure the system’s interoperability. This includes: the common use of frequencies, like potential limits; approval of equipment; and orientation that ensures the best use of communication protocols within certain connection bands. Similar to road traffic, these state regulations allow every citizen to travel along freely if they respect traffic rules. As Benkler (2006) outlines,

The choice between proprietary and commons-based wireless data networks takes on new significance in light of the market structure of the wired network, and the power it gives owners of broadband networks to control the information flow into the vast majority of homes. Commons-based wireless systems become the primary legal form of communications capacity that does not systematically subject its users to manipulation by an infrastructure owner. (p. 154)

As we have seen in the cases of the three cities, the model based on commons is technically viable and socially desirable. It could reduce communication costs, encourage local production and cultural exchange, foster the discovery of new uses, and interface with other wireless communication development. It could allow for the formation of mesh networks in a more efficient way, and that would enable the provision of free mobile technology between the inhabitants of certain localities. The fusion of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) with free signals in the best-range spectrums can stimulate communication, cultural production and local economies. However, as Werbach (2002) has warned:

Improving existing unlicensed bands isn’t enough. Most are so narrow and congested that their utility for open spectrum is limited. Furthermore, the high frequency of the most prominent unlicensed bands limits signal propagation. Lower-frequency spectrum that penetrates weather, tree cover, and walls would provide significant advantages for services such as last-mile broadband connectivity. (p. 16)

The 10-year window opened up by the 2007 move to digitization provides Brazil with the occasion to jump-start the public use of radio-frequency spectrum, which is critical for all forms of wireless communication. At that point, the analog television transmissions will cease, and most of the best quality spectrum frequencies will be returned to the state. If these spectrum ranges can be made publicly available, this could enlarge Brazil’s communication capacity, as well as its technological, cultural and creative potential. It is up to communication researchers to demonstrate the benefits of creating greater access to the Internet through the open spectrum model.

The creation of clouds of open connection in Brazil would not only encourage the purchase of computers, it could increase the types and range of connectivity. Ensuring free network connections to the entire population could be used to improve the educational and cultural uses of the Internet and electronic government services, and it might expand the inclusion of local communities in global electronic commerce. In the information era in which we live, communication must be thought of as a right, not as a business. Free access, through the provision of open spectrum, helps crystallize the idea of communication as an essential human right.

Notes

1. Source: IBGE, Diretoria de Pesquisas, Coordenação de Trabalho e Rendimento, Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios 2007.

2. “Richard Stallman and the FSF introduced the term ‘free software’. Later, the Open Source Initiative proposed ‘open source software’, allegedly to avoid the linguistic uncertainty associated with the English term ‘free’, specifically used by the Free Software Foundation to preserve the underlying concept of freedom. The ‘libre software’ term was introduced for the same reason, and used specially in Europe. The term ‘FLOSS’ was introduced by Rishab Gosh in the context of EU-funded project ‘Free/Libre and Open source software: survey and study’ started in 2002 as a catch-all term for free software and open source as described in this section. In this report we will use mainly the term FLOSS.” Retrieved from guide.conecta.it/FLOSSguide.pdf

3. This information was published in Souza, A. P., Pinheiro, D., & Athayde, P. (2008, August 13). O Brasil cai na rede. Carta Capital Magazine 508, 28.

References

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom.

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Biography

Sergio Amadeu da Silveira is Sociologist and Doctor of Political Science. He is a professor at Cásper Líbero Foundation.