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Un Manjar: Viral Chilean slang

By ucsanha, on 12 May 2016

manjarsh

 

In Chile, “manjar” is a kind of sweet sauce, similar to dulce de leche or caramel. It’s often used as filling in layer cakes or atop pancakes. It is almost universally loved for its smooth rich flavour. But ‘manjar’ is also used in slang to mean ‘rich’ or ‘sweet’ in other contexts as well. One may refer to a delicious holiday meal as ‘un manjar’ or equally to their love interest.

I had heard these uses of the word in Chile, and also being a fan of the sweet sauce, it made sense that it stood in for something to be savored. Yet when I attended a concert by American rock band Faith No More in Santiago, I was bewildered by the crowd’s repeated chanting of ‘un manjar! un manjar!’. Sure, the music was good, something to be savoured in the moment, but the food metaphor just didn’t seem apt to me. And the fact that it was being chanted in unison by thousands rather than whispered with a wink as that especially attractive acquaintance passed by, puzzled me even more.

But then I realised it was simply the buzz word of the moment. And not because of some fluke, but because, as is usual these days, social media had set off the trend, much as I explained for the resurgence of The Rhythm of the Night in Chilean night clubs in 2015.

In this instance, ‘manjar’ was thrown into heavy circulation when a youtube video surfaced of a Chilean campesino [person from the countryside] taking a long swig of very cheap wine, and then in a slow gruffy voice, proclaiming ‘un manjarsh’. Because of his accent and stereotypical campesino look, the man’s drunken proclamation was hilarious to young youtube viewers and as the video was passed around, use of the word ‘manjar’ shifted from occasional to self-consciously inserted into any possible exchange. Not only in spoken language, but Whatsapp messages, Facebook posts, Tweets, .gifs, memes, and even parody videos flooded Chileans’ internet. After a week or two the joke subsided, though when casually used, even several months later, the word still conjures the video of the campesino and his wine.

So, sure, this is just another story in grand quantity about how a word, idea, or image goes viral, has a short-lived moment in the spotlight, then fades from memory. But in this case, it also tells us something about nationalism and popular culture. Because manjar is considered something of a staple food in Chile, to call a person, food, or drink ‘un manjar’ not only says that the object is desirable, but that the person speaking about it does so from a particular position of being a ‘true Chilean.’ In some ways, urban youth may be lampooning the campesino with wine, but they are also identifying a similarity between him and themselves as Chileans. And when shouting it at an international rock concert, it claims the space and music as Chilean, not foreign, appropriating such rock music into a ‘true Chilean’ repertoire. I suppose it would be something like Americans chanting ‘apple pie’ at a U2 concert, claiming them as their own.

Ropa americana online: the local market for used clothing

By ucsanha, on 15 August 2015

Screen Shot 2015-08-13 at 16.23.47

A Facebook announcement from an online shop in northern Chile announces “Jackets, Vests, and Sweatshirts”

Ebay, Etsy, Alibaba, and Taobao have changed the way many people around the world shop. Now, you can get virtually any product from anywhere, delivered right to your door. Tom McDonald has even observed companies that have sprung up to make this possible in rural China where even courier services does not deliver (also see his blog about business Facebook pages). But in northern Chile, people aren’t really all that concerned with getting interesting things from far off places. To them, ropa americana [American clothing, code for used goods] is the cheapest and least impressive form of dressing. If one is looking for style, the department stores in the larger cities will do just fine.

But this doesn’t mean that there’s no market for these goods online. Many people, particularly older women, have developed “shops” through Facebook in order to sell used clothing. Just like their counterparts who operate physical used clothing shops in the semi-formal markets around the city, these women buy used clothes in bulk, and sell it to individual consumers. But instead of renting a stall, they take pictures of the individual items to upload to Facebook accounts that they have just for that purpose. When a potential buyer likes and item, they will negotiate a price (usually about $4 for a tshirt, a bit more for jeans or a dress, up to $20 for a coat), and a time and place to meet for the exchange. While new customers may simply ask the price as a comment on the picture, or send a private message through Facebook to arrange a drop-off, regular customers will send WhatsApp messages asking about specific items, hoping to get the best of the best before they even make it to the Facebook page.

Paola, who sells clothes mostly for men told me that a miner requested she meet him as he got off the bus, coming home from his shift at the mine. He had ripped his coat while at work, and was afraid of being very cold between the bus drop off and walking a few blocks home. Paola agreed to meet him at midnight at the bus, for just a few extra dollars.

So while in many ways social media has the ability to expand consumption options globally and allow people access to cosmopolitan goods they might not have imagined a decade ago, it can also take on a form that is distinctly local and personal. Like Paola meeting the miner at his bus, this is just one way that social media can truly strengthen the community bonds that people feel in their local place.

Personal and public aesthetics: What I learned from my own visceral reactions in the field

By ucsanha, on 25 June 2015

jair selfie

Photo by Nell Hayes

At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but over the first several months in my fieldsite in northern Chile I began to realize that one of the reasons I never quite felt totally at home was that the aesthetics of the place never quite fit with my own sense of aesthetics. By aesthetics, I mean the effort and thought that people put into the way things look. In my fieldsite, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, I noticed this in public parks and municipal buildings, in both the inside and outside of homes, and in the way people dressed. It was not only an intellectual exercise, but a visceral feeling. If I wore the clothes that I was used to wearing, perhaps a dress or a fitted button down shirt, I felt as if everyone was staring at me because I was dressed with too much care. Perhaps they were right. There wasn’t really anywhere to go looking smart. The only bar in the city had cement floors, cinderblock walls, and heavy metal bands playing live every weekend.

Over time I thought more about the sense of aesthetics in Alto Hospicio, and realized that while I had considered it entirely utilitarian at first, there was something more particular about it. The aesthetic was very much a part of the accessibility and normativity that prevailed in the city. The predominant aesthetic was not nonexistent, nor did it always privilege form above function or the “choice of the necessary” as Bourdieu calls the working class aesthetic. While many people clearly could afford to redecorate their homes or buy expensive clothing from the department stores in the nearby port city, their aesthetic choices leaned toward an appearance that was not too assuming. They didn’t flaunt or show off in any way. It was an aesthetic that was presented as if it were not one, because aspiring to a particular aesthetic would be performing something; a certain kind of pretension. Yet the aesthetic relies on deliberate choices to not be pretentious or striking; to be modest; to be unassuming. This aesthetic then not only predominated in the material world, but also online. Unlike in Brazil, where young people would never post a selfie in front of an unfinished wall, this was precisely the type of place youth in northern Chile might pose. While in Brazil this would associate the person with backwardness that contradicts the type of upward mobility they hope to present, in northern Chile this type of backdrop would add a sense of authenticity to the person and their unassuming lifestyle.

So, in the end, what began as a visceral feeling of discomfort in the field site, actually led to a very important insight. As I told academic friends many times during my fieldwork, “This place is a great site for research, but not at all a great site for living.” Fortunately, even some of the “not at all great” parts of about living in northern Chile helped my research more than I realized at first.

 

Reference

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Richard Nice, trans. New York: Routledge (1984), pp 41, 372, 376.

 

Self-Deprication

By ucsanha, on 23 March 2015

sperm meme

I recently wrote about the ways that northern Chileans express normativity on social media, using Kermit the Frog and contrasts between “Expected” and “Reality” memes as examples. But perhaps what demonstrates a desire for normativity even further is the way many individuals in Alto Hospicio express self-deprecation.

Much like the contrasts between expectation and reality, self-deprecation memes work to set up a contrast between idealized subjects and normativity. They may present an example of ambition, success, or a luxury lifestyle, yet do so through a frame of exaggeration. They then place themselves as a representative of normality, which contrasts with the ridiculousness of the exaggeration. In doing so, the humorous context allows them to adhere to normativity in an active sense. Rather that it being an implicit contrast to ambition, normativity is actively cultivated as an important value.

The photo above is just one example of self-deprecation in which the sperm that fertilizes the egg somehow outruns those that could have produced exceptional offspring: a Nobel Prize winner, a president, a movie star. “Me” is contrasted with these exceptional possibilities and is thus assumed to represent the ultimate ordinary possibility.

Other forms of self-deprecation involve references to the imperfect body (“A man without a belly is like a sky without stars”), academic credentials (A cemetery headstone engraved with “Here lie my ambitions to study), or material possessions (A picture of a rusty broken down car overlaid with the words “What do you say if I try to seduce you in my car tonight?”). These examples present the person who posts them as representative of the ordinary person who doesn’t live up to ideals that are considered to be out of reach. Instead they frame these more ideal forms as ridiculous through distancing. Sometimes they even explicitly spell out the benefits of normativity. One popular meme reminds readers that “Being ugly and poor has its advantages, when someone falls in love with you, they do it from the heart.” Again the poster of the meme positions them as ugly and poor, yet expresses happiness because this verifies the authenticity of relationships. Being ordinary means one doesn’t have to worry about being liked only for superficial reasons.

Self-deprecating humor is especially important, because it allows divergent self-representations to surface in ways that may be more accessible (both to the person who expresses the sentiment as well as to their audience) than literal expressions of ambition. Self-deprecating humor allows for play without alienating the audience because that which is outside of normativity is presented in a nonthreatening way (Ritchie 2005:288). In the context of normativity in Alto Hospicio, joking is a safe, and obviously popular way for people to express things that might not be acceptable otherwise.

References:

David Ritchie “Frame-Shifting in Humor and Irony” Metaphor and Symbol 20 no. 4 (2005):275-294.

 

Comparative ethnography: Local and global levels

By ucsanha, on 12 February 2015

For the first year of my fieldwork, I lived in Alto Hospicio, Chile, a city considered marginal and home to the working poor (as the US class system would call them). I spent the year chatting with neighbors in my large apartment building, kicking balls back to children playing in the street, shopping at the local markets and grocery stores, buying completo hot dogs from food vendors, walking along the dusty streets, and taking the public bus to and from Iquique. Now, for my last few months of fieldwork, I am living in Iquique, the larger port city, just 10 km down the 600 m high hill that creates a barrier between the two cities.

iqq beach 1

Photo by Nell Haynes

This project is based on comparative ethnography, but usually this means comparison across continents, hemispheres, and language barriers, at least. Yet, I have learned a great deal from comparing Iquique and Alto Hospicio, even in just one short month. Iquique is more lively, with a US-style shopping mall, many bars and restaurants, more variety in terms of grocery stores, a beach, a casino, and the sort of variety of different jobs and services available in mid-sized cities across the world. By comparison Alto Hospicio seems bare, even barren. There are no billboards there advertising the latest Tommy Hilfiger perfume (available in the TH shop in the tax free import zone of the city). There are no Peruvian-Italian fusion restaurants, or even cuisines like vegetarian, Indian, Mexican, Thai, or Italian alone. There is no theater, no yearly film festival, and—perhaps most disappointing for me last year—bars with happy hour deals on mojitos.

But what I know of Alto Hospicio, is that while there is less investment in infrastructure and commercial activity (or even advertisement), it is still a lively place. Neighbors chat, people take Saturday trips to the beach with their family, and friends gather to pass time or celebrate special occasions. But in many ways the lack of commercial activity gives Alto Hospicio a homogeneity that one does not encounter in Iquique. As I’ve written before, from the very shape of the houses to the clothing people wear, the spectrum of aesthetics is limited. People work in mining, in service industries, or own small businesses such as a corner store. And everyone knows that for “once” (pronounced own-say), the evening tea, the table will be equipped with bread, margarine, sliced cheese, and sandwich meat to accompany the hot tea. And most people seem quite content to share these things in common with their neighbors.

aho mirador

Photo by Nell Haynes

I wrote last month that the acceptance and even pride surrounding normativity is reflected on social media. But in looking at the social media in Iquique this becomes even more apparent. Foreign newspaper and magazine links are much more prominent. People post pictures from events they attended or even displaying the new throw pillows they’ve purchased for their couch, while in Alto Hospicio photos taken inside the home are rarely are intended to demonstrate the interior decoration. And the percentage of funny memes is much much higher in Alto Hospicio.

None of this shocks me. Coming from a middle-class US background, Iquique feels more like home, and Facebook usage from those residing here looks much more like what my friends at home post. But what this reminds me of is the ways that homogeneity may be working as the world becomes more and more connected. Iquique begins to look and feel like the Midwest of North America (well, with the added bonus of a Pacific Ocean beach), while Alto Hospicio remains very locally focused. That is to say, perhaps certain places are more or less likely to be both homogenized by social media, and have that homogeneity reflected on social media, given their figurative proximity to the global centers (in terms of economics, aesthetics, consumption, services, education, and work opportunities). By looking across all 9 sites of the Global Social Media Impact Study, this may become more or less apparent. We may find that those places that remain on the global “periphery” remain peripheral on social media as well. There may only be a 10km highway separating Alto Hospicio from Iquique, but the differences seem continental.

Normativity on social media in Northern Chile

By ucsanha, on 7 January 2015

As many entries in the blog affirm, local cultural aspects are often reflected or made even more visual on social media. As I have written before of my fieldsite, there is a certain normativity that pervades social life. Material goods such as homes, clothing, electronics, and even food all fall within an “acceptable” range of normality. No one is trying to keep up with Joneses, because there’s no need. Instead the Joneses and the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Correas all outwardly exhibit pretty much the same level of consumerism. Work and salary similarly fall within a circumscribed set of opportunities, and because there is little market for advanced degrees, technical education or a 2 year post-secondary degree is usually the highest one will achieve academically. This acceptance of normativity is apparent on social media as well.

One particularly amusing example of this type of acceptance is especially apparent from a certain style of meme that overwhelmed Facebook in October of 2014. These “Rana René” (Kermit the Frog, in English) memes expressed a sense of abandoned aspirations. In these memes, the frog expresses desire for something—a better physique, nicer material goods, a better family- or love-life—but concludes that it is unlikely to happen, and that “se me pasa,” “I get over it.”

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Similarly, during June and July of 2013 a common form of meme contrasted the expected with reality. The example below demonstrates the “expected” man at the beach—one who looks like a model, with a fit body, tan skin, and picturesque background. The “reality” shows a man who is out of shape, lighter skinned, and on a beach populated by other people and structures. It does not portray the sort of serene, dreamlike setting of the “expected.” In others, the “expected” would portray equally “ideal” settings, people, clothing, parties, architecture, or romantic situations. The reality would always humorously demonstrate something more mundane, or even disastrous. These memes became so ubiquitous that they were even used as inspiration for advertising, as for the dessert brand below.

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For me, these correspondences between social media and social life reinforce the assertion by the Global Social Media Impact Study that this type of research must combine online work with grounded ethnography in the fieldsite. These posts could have caught my eye had I never set foot in northern Chile, but knowing what I know about what the place and people look like, how they act, and what the desires and aspirations are for individuals, I understand the importance of these posts as expressing the normativity that is so important to the social fabric of the community.

It’s all in the comments: the sociality behind social media

By ucsanha, on 2 December 2014

autoconstrucion boys

boys in the fieldsite hang out after school and look at Facebook on a mobile phone

As I begin to write my book about social media in Northern Chile, it’s great to see little insights emerge. One of the first of these insights is that interaction is essential to the ways people in my fieldsite use social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are the most widely used, with 95% of people using Facebook (82% daily), and 77% using Whatsapp with frequency. But with other sites or applications, use falls off drastically. The next two most popular forms of social media are Twitter and Instagram which are used by 30% and 22% of those surveyed respectively.

So what makes Facebook so popular but not Twitter? My first reaction was that Twitter doesn’t have the visual component that Facebook does. This was partially based on the fact that many of my informants told me that they find Twitter boring. Yet Instagram is even less well-used than Twitter. And as I began looking more closely at the specific ways people use Facebook and Twitter, I began to see why they feel this way.

People use Facebook most frequently because they are most likely to get a response on that platform. In fact, this forms a sort of feedback loop in which people perceive that others use it more, so when they want the most feedback they use Facebook, which in turn keeps others coming back as well. As this cycle continues, people know that if they want their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and even enemies to see something, Facebook is the place to put it. This is also what attracts older generations to use Facebook—if they want to see what is going on with younger generations, they join. But as their age-peers join for the same reasoning, they begin interacting with them as well. In essence, Facebook is the most truly social of the social media for people living in Alto Hospicio.

This desire for interaction is exemplified by the fact that far more important than writing statuses, or even posting photographs, memes, videos, or links to websites of interest, is the commenting in which people engage. It is not unusual to find a single sentence status update that has more than twenty comments. Many comments are positive and supportive. When a young woman posts a new profile picture, it will usually receive more than ten comments essentially expressing the same thing: “Oh [daughter/niece/ friend/cousin] you look so pretty and happy!” When someone expresses a complaint, like neighbours playing music too loudly, comments usually range from “How annoying!” to “Do you want to borrow my big speakers so you can show them your music is better?” These comments generally serve a function of staying in contact and supporting friends and family by simply reminding them that you are paying attention and care about them.

This type of cohesion has impacts beyond social media as well. Many friends of friends actually get to know one another through such comments on social media, so that by the time they end up meeting in person at a party or group outing, they are already familiar with one another, friendly, and if they’ve interacted enough on the same posts, may have already added one another as friends on Facebook. Thus, Facebook is not only a space for interacting with old friends, but making new ones as well.

Aside from helping me to understand how important sociality is to people in my fieldsite, this realization also serves as an excellent example of the ways quantitative and qualitative research support one another. Quantitative data from my survey alerted me to the fact that Facebook was popular not just for it’s visual uses. But I had to go back to my qualitative research to find out why exactly this might be. As I continue to analyze and write, I find that I keep bouncing between the two, reassuring me that without both aspects, this project would not have been complete.

For more on the confluence of qualitative and quantitative data, here are examples from England and Brazil.

Regulating the body in Chilean cyberspace

By ucsanha, on 22 September 2014

no desnudes

Last week, a friend here in Northern Chile posted on his Facebook wall a stylized drawing of a woman’s body with the words: “Don’t show your naked body on social networking sites. Gain the admiration and respect of your contacts and friends by showing your qualities as a person. What makes you sexy and beautiful is not your body, but your personality. Women and girls deserve respect.”

This was not the first time I had seen such a post. I have seen such memes circulating for several months, posted by grandmothers, mothers, and young men and women. But this post made me pause because my friend Miguel was the one who posted it. A few months into my fieldwork, Miguel was showing me a funny meme his friend had posted. As he scrolled down on his Facebook feed, he passed a post from Playboy Magazine that showed two women in bikinis. “Oh, those are my ugly cousins!” he joked. As he scrolled down there were several other posts from Playboy and he told me “My cousins post pictures of themselves a lot.”

Since the subject had been breached, he seemed to feel comfortable discussing semi-pornographic posts with me and I took advantage of the situation by continuing to ask questions. He told me all about “the new thing” of pictures of the underside of women’s breasts rather than their cleavage. He switched to Whatsapp and clicked a link a friend had sent him to demonstrate. There I saw “50 of the Best Underboob Shots on the Internet,” mostly taken selfie-style either in the mirror, or up one’s own shirt. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or confused.

With this previous discussion in mind, in which, quite openly he discussed how he enjoyed seeing overtly sexy pictures that women take of their bodies, it seemed strange that he would post such a meme chastising women for doing this very thing.

Of course, there is a big difference between the women who are likely the intended recipients of his message and the women who are displayed on Playboy’s Facebook page. That is: he expects his female friends to read his Facebook wall. He does not expect Playboy models, or even the women whose reverse cleavage pictures are floating around the internet to be his followers on Facebook. In essence, his Facebook activity is revealing of something anthropologists have long known; we treat friends and acquaintances differently than we treat strangers (for example see Simmel’s essay on The Stranger and our own blog about chatting to Strangers in China). In this case it is acceptable to objectify the bodies of strangers, but he hopes that the women he knows personally will not openly contribute to their own objectification.

In looking through my own female Facebook friends from Northern Chile, I don’t see any pictures that are overtly sexual and show body parts that one wouldn’t reveal on a hot summer day. However, in my “you might know…” suggestions, I do see several such profile pictures for accounts based in this city. Miguel, along with other friends—both male and female—assured me that these profiles were fake (see also controversies of fake profiles in India and Turkey). “They say they’re from here but I’ve never met any of these women. They’re definitely fake profiles.”

To me this suggests two related points about the ways the regulation of bodies and nudity are happening online. The first is simply that these “Don’t show your naked body” memes represent a way of surveilling and controlling what others do with their bodies. They use straw-women as a warning, suggesting that showing too much body on social media will result in people losing respect. This strategy seems to have worked as well. Young women in northern Chile shy away from showing their bodies in contexts connected to their public personality. Yet the pictures still appear in the form of anonymous or fake profiles. Using fake names and profile pictures, they still post faceless photos exposing body parts fit only for a very liberal beach.

While this in some ways may be seen as a victory for young women’s self-worth based on traits not connected to their sexuality or bodies’ likenesses to those featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the surveillance and judgment of their online activity represents another issue—regulation that denies young women agency over the representation of their own bodies. This is one thing when coming from mothers and aunts, but young men like Miguel present a double standard in which their social networking activity elevates the bodies of strangers—from swimsuit models to unknown women taking risqué selfies, while condemning their own peers for similar self-representations. It’s not hard to imagine then why fake profiles might be a good option for young women trying to find self esteem about their bodies and their own ways to fit into the world of social networking.

In the end, what this tells us about social networking sites in this context, is that they are still very closely connected to the body. The internet is not a haven for free-floating identity, disconnected from our physical form, but is a place where bodies may still be seen as a representation of an individual, may still be regulated, and may still be a site of agency or repression. Rather than actually showing the respect that “women and girls deserve,” these memes further regulate women. Much as catcalls on the street regulate women’s bodies in physical space, memes that tell women what is acceptable for their bodies do so in the space of the internet.

If you are interested in themes of surveillance and control, see also Caste Related Profiles on Facebook in India, Facebook and the Vulnerability of the Self and Love is… in Turkey, and Social Media and the Sense of Autonomy in Italy.

On death and desserts: Mourning heroes on Facebook

By ucsanha, on 11 August 2014

chumbeque

Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

On 5 December 2013, Nelson Mandela died. At the time, I was reviewing about 50 different Facebook accounts of people living in my Northern Chile fieldsite to see in a systematic way, what exactly they posted about on Facebook. I noted that only a few posted about Nelson Mandela. Those that did made funny ironic references to actor Morgan Freeman, who portrayed the South African politician in a film biography, while more politically socialist users posted old photos of the politician alongside their hero Fidel Castro. Yet these posts represented only 6 of the 50 users I was concentrating on, or 12%.

That same week Paul Walker, a film actor of The Fast and the Furious fame, also died. More than 20 of the users whose activity I was observing posted about his death on Facebook. As with Mandela’s death, no one linked to obituaries or news articles, but instead posted photos of the actor, or at times posted photos of their own cars with quotes from The Fast and the Furious or other commentary suggesting that the films had inspired their love of automobiles.

From this, along with Presidential elections which had just taken place in Chile, I got a sense that people were much more likely to post something on Facebook when they felt personally affected by it. While people recognized the significant contributions of Mandela to peace and humanitarian efforts, he had not affected Chileans’ daily lives, while Walker had been an important hero for many people. One young man posted about both. On the day of Mandela’s death he simply wrote “QDEP Morgan Freeman” [Rest in Peace Morgan Freeman] in an ironic and humorous attempt to conflate the politician with the actor who had portrayed him. A few days later, when news of Walker broke, he wrote, “I’m watching The Fast and the Furious on TNT (television channel)…in honor of the movies that inspired my Honda, and more importantly in memory of Paul Walker.” Clearly this user had reserved the more sincere and personal message for Walker who he characterized as an inspiration.

My insight that personal connection was more important than world impact has been put to the test again with the unfortunate death of a local celebrity. Arturo Mejía Koo, the son of Chinese immigrants to the region, was locally known as the authority on chembeques—a kind of pastry made of corn flour and honey. Though chembeques can be found in almost any outdoor market in the region, Koo’s shop was something of a pilgrimage point for those who love the dessert. Perhaps then, it’s not surprising that Facebook has been littered with homages to Koo. At the time of this writing, about 1/5 of the posts that appear on my Facebook timeline are related to Koo’s death. People post links to the local paper’s story with a simple comment of a frowning face, or no comment at all. Others post links with the comment “Noooooooooooooooo!!!” Responses are lacking in eloquence, but the sheer number of them is impressive.

Among my highly educated, urban, middle-class friends in the United States, posting about the death of a highly iconic politician such as Mandela was an act of both proclaiming political stance and being “in the know.” Yet in Chile, it is much more important to be “in the know” about local events. While in both places I see memes that circulate with text such as “If you didn’t eat/watch/play [insert local favorite], you didn’t grow up in [insert local area],” Northern Chileans take to heart this mentality. They experience the death of world icons with a grain of irony, likely owing to the distance they perceive between that person’s life and their own. Yet a local hero’s death is experienced as a personal heartfelt loss.

This makes clear that for most Northern Chileans, Facebook is an outlet for performing personal and local affiliations, rather than a platform for interacting with global discourses. Mandela’s death was noteworthy for a few because he was a world figure. Yet lacking in a personal connection, emotions were expressed through irony or affiliations with other more regionally relevant politicians. Walker’s death was important for some because he had been a Hollywood hero, yet was still expressed at a distance through reference to his film roles. But in the instance of Koo’s death huge numbers of people in the region feel personally affected because eating his pastries had been an important part of local belonging. Facebook then was an appropriate place to express the very simple emotions of sadness and disbelief that emerged from the loss that felt so personal. The outpouring of public response to Koo’s death then demonstrates the ways that Facebook may reflect local affiliations much more strongly than global awareness.

Seeing red: watching the World Cup in Northern Chile

By ucsanha, on 27 June 2014

kids marea roja

Neighborhood children celebrate Chile’s victory. Photo by Nell Haynes

The very first night I spent in my fieldsite in Northern Chile, the national team qualified for the World Cup. I had no TV, no radio, and internet only through my smartphone. But I knew every time the team scored. Horns honked, dogs barked, whistles cut through the evening air, a dull roar of shouts bouncing off one another between the small homes, and six floor apartment buildings hung around the city like the fog that rolls in every afternoon from the Pacific Ocean. When the opposing team scored, you could hear the low rumble of grumbling viewers. By the game’s end, the horns were honking again, fireworks were being set off, and I ventured to my balcony to see people waving large flags in the street.

After nine months in this working class city of 100,000 people, football is back, and it is everywhere. Though advertising in general is limited, people find individual ways to visibly express their excitement about World Cup. The single bar in the city has no signs outside or inside advertising that they will be open for games. Restaurants have no specials. This is possibly because people tend to watch at home with friends and family, grilling meat, and drinking beer, rather than watch in in a more public place. Or perhaps people feel inclined to watch from home because there is no incentive to watch in a public place. Either way, the result is clear. When I watched one afternoon game at the bar, I was one of only 5 patrons (all the others being 20-30 something men who seemed to know the bartender on duty). In fact, the family and friends joining together in each private home usually outnumbered those gathered in the bar.

anita futbol

A small crowd watches Chile vs. Netherlands in the local bar. Photo by Jair Correa.

The few instances of businesses advertising World Cup specials were limited to interntional companies. The hardware store (owned by US company Home Depot), and one supermarket (owned by Walmart) had special giveaways advertised, and of course the Coca Cola and Becker beer cans on sale throughout the country are decorated with football themed designs. But on a local level nothing commercialized about the World Cup. Instead, people have individually created visible practices associated with supporting their national team—wearing red football jerseys, setting off fireworks, and posting a great deal on social networking sites. These posts began about a week before the World Cup began, in anticipation.

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A World Cup themed display in Sodimac Homecenter. Photo by Nell Haynes

Many of the Facebook posts were typically Chilean in style, in that they were humorous memes. Some compared the team’s coach, Jorge Sampaoli, who is bald, to bald reggaetón singer Pitbull. Others, in anticipation of a match against the Australian team, featured pictures of kangaroos in compromising positions. Others posted sarcastic cartoons about the blindness with which Chileans follow football, or “Survival Guides” for those uninterested in the games. Politically involved young people often posted links to articles about the protests in Brazil, often followed by an image supporting the Chilean team, and commenting on their sense of feeling torn between the game they love and the capitalist exploitations behind the event. “Vamos Chile…..a pesar que el trasfondo del mundial es una mierda no pueden negar que el futbol es hermoso sobretodo cuando gana chile” [Let’s go Chile…..it’s a shame that the transformation of the World Cup is shitty, but they can’t negate that football is beautiful and above all when chile wins”

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A popular meme circulating before and during the Chile vs. Australia match.

On the day of the game, posts turned more personal. Young men and middle-aged mothers alike post on Facebook invitations to friends to watch the game in their homes, often enticing them with photos of beer or food accompanied by a Chilean flag or football. Local businesses such as Chinese restaurants suggest customers should “put their orders in now to go along with The Red” (the nickname for the national team).

The experience of watching the games was captured in photos posted on Facebook and Instagram. These usually consist of people wearing red football jerseys, red, white, and blue wigs, hats that look like footballs, and other variations on festive attire, while standing next to a large television displaying a match. Others display the meats being grilled while watching the game. Even those stuck at work during games. Posted selfies at their desk while draped in the national flag. The large percentage of men working in mining operations several hours outside of the city were not left out. A few hours later, after they’ve finished their twelve hour shift, workers in the nearby copper mines post their cell phone videos of hundreds of their coworkers erupting as they watch a goal being scored from the company dining hall.

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An Instagram photo shared during the Chile vs. Spain game.

But more telling than these orchestrated photos and videos were the immediate reactions to the game that were posted in simple messages on Facebook. When there was something to cheer about, my Facebook feed instantly filled with simple statements of “conchetumare” (a somewhat all-purpose expletive), “weon!” (somewhat equivalent to ‘dude’), “vamos chile mierda” [let’s go chile. shit!], and  of course, “goooollllll” after every score.

After the games, Instagram and Facebook again filled with photos of people celebrating in the streets. Huge crowds gathered in plazas to set off fireworks, sing fight songs, and generally continue the party. People posted videos of the national hymn being sung at the start of the game. These were not just young people, but grandparents and mothers carrying young children. Of course, the posts stopped about two hours after the game ended, but I could still hear the singing and fireworks through my closed window late into the night.

And then, the next day, in further, but subdued celebration, memes reappeared teasing opponents who lost, or chastising referees blamed for a Chilean loss. After defeating current world champion, Spain, a photo of an airplane bearing the Spanish flag, with “gentlemen, start your engines” was shared by many people.

Overall, on non-game days, about 20% of posts are related to the world cup. On game days, this rises slowly until they peak during the actual game the make up more than 60% of posts from the 90 people I follow on Facebook. Similarly, among Instagram users from my fieldsite, about 80% of photos posted during game time have something to do with the game. Clearly, for many people, life stopped in order to watch the game. Yet, in order to actively participate in a community of fans, social networking provided an outlet for humor, pride, predictions, and even gut reactions to plays. This may have something to do with the fact that people are watching in small groups in private spaces, rather than large numbers gathering in the local bar. While family members got up to dance and toot horns after each goal scored when I watched from friends’ homes, they seemed to want a more collective experience. This desire was summed up by my friend’s uncle, who after Chile’s win over Spain quickly declared, “Let’s all go outside and see what’s going on in the streets. If there’s a party happening we need to be a part of it.”

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A mashup of photos of people literally partying in the street after the Chilean team beat Spain, posted on both Instagram and Facebook.

It is also worth noting that the number of posts on either social media site that reference support for a team other than Chile is almost non-existent. There is a somewhat large population of Colombian immigrants in the fieldsite, and thus, the Colombian team has had a few posts in it’s support. By overwhelmingly, the posts reference the team of the poster’s home nation. The World Cup is not about the world, but about Chile’s place in it, and Facebook, rather than acting as a window to a “global civil society” (Tomlinson and Young 2006:1) rather functions much as Anderson described early national newspapers as foundational to a sense of community as a nation. In fact the simultaneity he described (1983:37) has gone into warp speed as people have moved from reading the same daily news items, to being able to immediately comment on an acquaintance’s “conchatumadre” just seconds after a Chilean player scores. This Saturday, Chile will battle home team Brazil in the second round of the tournament, and might be eliminated. If that happens it will be interesting to see if excitement and Facebook posts continue, as people in my fieldsite cheer on other South American teams, or if the exit of the Chilean team will mean an absence of attention to the World Cup both in media consumption, and social media curation. Then again, maybe predictions will be right and we’ll never get a chance to know, because Chile will win it all!

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A widely shared image of how Chile could pass through the rounds to win the World Cup.

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.

Tomlinson, Alan, and Christopher Young, eds. National identity and global sports events: Culture, politics, and spectacle in the Olympics and the football World Cup. SUNY Press, 2006.

THE WORLD CUP ON SOCIAL MEDIA WORLDWIDE
This article is part of a special series of blog posts profiling how social media is affecting how ordinary people from communities across the planet experience the 2014 World Cup.