New Media and the Disillusion of Brazil’s Radical Left
by Catherine Morgans
In contrast to recent waves of ad hoc social-media-fueled protest, Brazil’s leftist social movements consider new media unreliable, supplementary, and dominated by hegemonic actors. Owing to a shift in power relations online, these virtual spaces pose an approximation to their capitalist adversaries, a degree of institutionalization, and a breach of traditional trenches of resistance, leading anticapitalist movements to restrict their use of new media. Their wariness counters resurgent cyberoptimism that regards the Internet as a politically neutral or autonomous space favored by marginalized and alternative political actors.
