No Surprise: Brazil Moves to Metaplace

A few days ago, Raph Koster twittered the above interesting comment.

This should come as no surprise. Brazilians have consistently demonstrated an almost hive-like approach to social and new media over the past decade. I've been tracking Brazilian techno-culture for about that long formally, and informally, having lived there on-and-off for the past 30 years.

I blogged last year about some other examples of Brazilians taking over English-language social media platforms, including Blogger when it first launched and then Orkut. Brazilians also demonstrated a significant presence in the virtual world of Second Life, about which we blogged.



What's fascinating is that Brazilians are not so hive-like in the physical world: They tend not to congregate among other Brazilians once they leave their country, unlike many other expatriate communities. In interviews I conducted in 2006 with former Brazilian Ambassadors to Moscow, the US and the United Nations, including a former Brazilian president, all of them expressed some frustration with the challenge of finding and engaging Brazilian communities living abroad, particularly to assist with visa and citizenship issues. At the time the foreign service was not yet using social media tools to engage communities. The government as a whole, however, was way ahead of other governments in understanding the potential of the Internet as an outreach tool. The Brazilian Ministry of Culture was one of the earliest adopters of newer social media technologies.

At the same time, these diplomats expressed a concurrent frustration with trying to counter the image of Brazil as a "Carnival Culture". What is Carnival Culture? Carnival is a annual festival in which people take a break from the work-a-day pressures of the "real world" to play. The centerpiece of Carnival is a massive costume party -- a mixed-identity free-for-all, where people from all levels of the social and economic hierarchy, more-or-less equalize.

In essence, Brazilians are experts at identity play. So it should come as no surprise that they have taken to social media with the inherent mixed-identity of that culture.