Baird Campbell and I have written a blog post, available on Platypus, the blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. The blog details the ways we see Chileans distrusting traditional media outlets and using social media as an archive...yet an archive that is already assumed to be unstable. 

This rift in the types of videos that we received privately, rather than posted publicly indicates a particular understanding of the uses of Internet-based communication. In fact, it seems to indicate an anxiety about digital communication related to its potential ephemerality, a shortcoming that can only be remedied by widespread sharing and archiving across diversified social networks across the globe.

To read the full blog post, click here to go to Platypus.
O haz click aquí para leer en español 

​Chilean Media Amidst Protest

I woke up Saturday morning with a direct Instagram message from my friend Mateo. “Share please,” it said, with a formatted text with the title “State of Constitutional Emergency in Chile, October 2019.” In the 3 days since, he continued to send infographics and then videos of protests, each time asking me to share them.
 
“The media here is making it seem as if we are violent delinquents, but we are mostly peaceful. And the media outside of Chile isn’t showing anything. Please help us share the message.”
 
As Chile has recently erupted in protest, police violence, and other sorts of chaos, from the Atacama to Patagonia, media is taking on a central role in the tensions. From 2013-2016 I lived in Chile, in both the capital of Santiago, and the far north region. Coincidentally, Mateo lived in the north while I did, though he had spent most of his life in Santiago, and has since returned. His use, as well as criticism, of media, along with dozens of other Chileans in both the metropolitan region and the north, provide important insight to many protestors’ grievances and tactics in this historic moment.


Chile in State of Emergency
 
On Sunday 13 October, Chile’s Transport Ministry announced that the Santiago metro would raise fares by 30 pesos (about 4 cents in USD). This seemingly small increase, however, must be placed in the context of the average Chilean’s monthly salary around $450.
 
In response students started organizing fare-dodging acts all over the city. Fare dodging is not uncommon in Santiago where late-night bus drivers are often defenseless against crowds of young people pouring onto the bus or jumping turnstiles without paying. This coordinated effort however far exceeded previous levels.
 
Soon the protest spread beyond students, particularly when politicians made poorly calculated comments in response (link to The Minister of Economy, Juan Andrés Fontaine, indicated live on TV that workers should get up earlier to catch public transport when the fare is lower).
 
But these protests are not simply about a fare increase. As many hashtags and memes attest, it is not about 30 pesos, but about 30 years of inequality.
 
Chile is classified as a highly developed country by the World Bank, but also consistently ranks as having the very highest rates of social inequality among such countries. A meme which was first shared with me on Sunday October 20th, depicts an iceberg with “Increased public transport cost” above water and a long list of other effects of neoliberalism below the surface: poor but expensive education, deficient healthcare system, pension system crisis, inadequate salaries along with high disparity between general public and the political elite, precarious employment, police corruption, corporate corruption and collusion, and even the privatization of water. 

These grievances are attributed to the last 30 years—the time since the “No” vote which ended the brutal dictatorship of Agosto Pinochet. While “neoliberalism” is often a catch-all phrase for economics associated with the free market, post-1985, in Chile it is directly connected to Pinochet’s regime, who specifically brought Milton Friedman to the country in 1973 to impose economic “shock” theories as a test case. His policies privatized companies and resources, deregulated business, cut social services, and opened the country to unimpeded imports. Inflation then spiraled to 374% and unemployment reached 20% per cent. The government almost entirely defunded social services, the social security system was privatized, health care became a pay-as-you-go system, and public schools were replaced with charter schools. Pinochet’s government maintained these policies until 1982 when the Chilean economy crashed – debt exploded, hyperinflation took hold and unemployment rocketed to 30 per cent. Pinochet’s regime was finally defeated in a democratic election in 1989. However, many Chileans feel subsequent democratically elected administrations have only intensified the export-oriented neoliberal reforms, though with less violent and totalitarian control. 


Chilean Media
 
While Reporters without Borders gives Chile a favorable score for press freedom, they note that “pluralism and democratic debate are limited” by media ownership concentrated among the elite who share interests with those in political power. Community media, particularly in radio, has a long history in the country, but its ability to spread information widely is not always adequate.
 
At the same time, about 78% of Chileans have Internet access and most are well-connected on social media. Yet as I found in northern Chile, many people shy away from discussing politics openly on social media, in part a lingering result of sixteen years of dictatorship. While many northern Chileans post funny memes about how politicians are disconnected from the lives of “real Chileans,” they shy away from direct criticism or analysis of politicians and policy. One exception I found was that during the April 2014 8.2 Richter scale earthquake in the region, northerners realized the world was paying attention and use primarily Facebook and Instagram as stages for calling attention to the lingering effects of the natural disaster and the national government’s slow and inadequate disaster relief.
 
Northerners also use social media to demonstrate the ways they differ from even regular people in Santiago. They see Santiago as a place of consumption, whereas the North, known for its rich copper deposits, is a place of labor. Santiago is a place of strangers and vulnerability to urban crime, while northerners watch out for one another. They see Santiago as the beneficiaries of their work, as wealthy and politically elite, even as they may know working-class people there. Overall, Santiago is framed as having very little in common with the northern region of the country.
 
Social media use in Santiago is more similar to the types of political engagement we see by those connecting online from countries in North America or Western Europe. Most people are forthright about their political stances and use social media as a space for criticism and at times, campaigning. While they do not take much time to compare themselves with those outside of the metropolitan region, northerners would use this fact as further evidence that those in Santiago hardly realize anyone else in the country exists. 


October 2019
 
Because Mateo has lived most of his life in Santiago, I was not particularly struck that his feed quickly filled with protest-related content. But just a day later I began to see photographs and videos of protests being posted by Chileans in the north of the country. People shouting in the street in Arica, Iquique, and Antofogasta appeared in my Facebook and Instagram inboxes with little comment other than “please share.” In my 18 months living in the region, I had only ever seen those sorts of crowds in the streets after the national football team won a championship.
 
This use of social media was a departure from the sorts of usual posts northerners shared. It reminded me of post-earthquake posts in the ways they attempted to address a global audience in order to bring an issue of injustice to attention. These posts differed from the somewhat apolitical posts after the earthquake. The social media content of northerners in the last few days has been highly political, often accompanied by hashtags calling for the president to resign.
 
Thus, it is clear that northerners see these calls as legitimate and possible. They are not apt to share such sentiments as a pipe dream, but rather save their political calls to action for moments in which they believe they are justified, possible, and aided by international attention. Essentially these posts demonstrate that northerners sense a real possibility of change. 

​We are united
 
On October 20, President Piñera, flanked by almost 2 dozen military leaders, declared on national television, “We are at war against a powerful enemy, unrelenting, that doesn’t respect anything or anyone, and that is apt to use violence and delinquency without limit, that is apt to burn our hospitals, the metro, the supermarkets, with the only purpose to produce as much damage as possible.”
 
In response, Chileans throughout the country took to social media, asserting “We are not at war, we are united.”
​
While nationalist discourses in Chile are common, they are usually colored by equally powerful senses of regional belonging, that may just as easily highlight difference among Chileans as call for unity. Yet, social media is now showing this slogan to be quite true. For a moment, Chileans throughout the country are seeing “the people” of different regions, including those of Santiago, as united against politicians, corruption, and inequality. If tweets demanding that Piñera resign or that Chile has awoken are any indication, Chileans from all over the 2600 mile long coastline are coming together with a common message, that they are united against the inequalities they have faced for the last 30 years. 
​

​The social media sphere is all abuzz with the hashtag #justaddzebras this week, after John Oliver featured Bolivia’s traffic directing Cebras on his Sunday evening show. I have been a big fan of the Cebras, and even tried to join the “Cebra por un día” program, though research obligations foiled my attempt. I’ve also known a few young people who have worked as Cebras, who think of it, not as a job, but as a personal commitment. Needless to say, I immediately let out a gasp of pleasure, when I saw where John was going with his monologue, then retroactively tagged all my Instagram photos with Cebras.

​After a show on Trump’s budget, Oliver used the Cebras to lighten the air, which to be clear I not only support, but was thrilled by. ​But what I want to talk about is the lead up Oliver provided to the bit on the Cebras—he began by introducing Bolivia with an inset map in which Colombia was highlighted. Then pointed out that the highlighted country was not Bolivia, but Venezuela, Then switched the highlighting to Venezuela saying it was Colombia. And after a short bit switching highlighting around to different countries, claiming them as Bolivia, he finally showed the right country, and moved on. He pulled the same stunt on February 23, 2015, in which he showed Ecuador and Paraguay highlighted instead of the correct country, introducing a segment in which he notes that the only country that elects judges in a process similar to the United States is Bolivia. After showing the confusing map images, John comments, “This gag is never not going to be fun.”

And I’m sure it is fun for him. But I find it annoying. Perhaps it does have some educational value, but it also makes fun of and in doing so validates U.S. Americans’ utter lack of geographic knowledge about most of the world. Rather than viewers feeling as if they should know where Bolivia is, they laugh along at how silly it would be for them to know where this country is, that apparently has nothing to offer but examples of poorly designed judge selection and dancing animal-costumed traffic directors. This joins the unfortunate media portrayals of Bolivia in Sandra Bullock’s remake of the documentary Our Brand Is Crisis, in which the campaign of former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada is highlighted without any reference to the despicable human rights violations he oversaw the following year (See Linda Farthing’s review of the film here). It also joins the portrayls of Bolivia I highlighted in my Ph.D. Dissertation, including the film Horrible Bosses in which a character suggests chemical waste should be sent to Bolivia, and Woody Allen’s Manhattan which references “those barefoot kids from Bolivia who need foster parents” (p 190, find the full document here).
 
All together these portrayals highlight the incommensurability, exoticism, and Otherness of Bolivia as compared to the United States. It is a place of strange customs, a third world wasteland, and proof that U.S. politics are screwy, indicated by their similarity to this obviously (implicitly indexed) Banana Republic-esque underdeveloped nation. On one hand, John Oliver’s most recent #justaddzebras bit at least extends us beyond the political and “inequal” to focus on the lively culture of my favorite country. But his framing did the bit a disservice. Only by taking seriously the context of Bolivia as a complex nation with more to offer than “barefoot children” and shady politics, will the humor of the Cebras really work in productive ways. 

this fieldnote was originally posted on The Geek Anthropologist

Social media is no longer the geek domain it once was, with the Americas and Europe approaching a fifty percent penetration rate, and an overall global penetration rate of over thirty percent. But as these platforms and apps become more widely used, they also become more specialized to certain kinds of use intended for certain kinds of audiences. And as audiences shift, new types of communities emerge through social media.

In field Alto Hospicio, a marginal city in northern Chile, some of the most interesting ethnographic details have to do with the ways young people use collaboratively managed Tumblr accounts to create a sense of a community through language play and humor, extending beyond the local area to a nationally imagined community. This identification with a national community is actually quite an anomaly, because in many senses the people of Alto Hospicio often distinguish themselves from people in other regions of the country, considering themselves to be more marginal and exploited than the average Chilean citizen. The city is located in a booming copper mining area, but most residents are low-level workers in the industry, and watch as the massive profits end up in the national capital of Santiago or abroad in Europe, North America, and Australia. In general, most citizens envision themselves as economically disadvantaged and politically (and geographically) marginalized. While marginality is often used as a category of analysis within the social sciences, generally to describe the conditions of people who struggle to gain societal and spatial access to resources and full participation in political life, in the case of Alto Hospicio, marginality is incorporated into the ways citizens view their own position in contrast to those people the see as more powerful in the center of the country. In actively distancing themselves from cities such as Santiago – both in daily life and through their online activity – residents of Alto Hospicio see their marginalized city as part of the way they perceive them- selves – not as victims, but as an exploited community that continues to fight for its rights. Yet they strongly identify as Chileans, citing their cultural affiliations rather than political power.

​Please read the full blog on THE GEEK ANTHROPOLOGIST

This post comes from the Global Social Media Impact Study Blog, originally published here.

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.

For More on Aesthetics in Alto Hospicio
Absent Aesthetics in Alto Hospicio
Aesthetics and Digital Media in Alto Hospicio

Reference

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

I recently gave a talk in the department of anthropology at my home university Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile about normativity and aesthetics as they appear on social media in Alto Hospicio. The talk was in Spanish, but I of course organized my thoughts in English first, particularly since it was based in party by a chapter of my forthcoming book, Social Media in Northern Chile (with University College London Press). After the presentation I created some pdfs of the talk, complete with all the images that accompany it, which can now be found in English here and in español aquí.

Hace un mes, di una charla en la facultad de antropología en mi universidad Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile en el tema de normatividad y la estetica en las redes sociales de Alto Hospicio. Hice la charla en español, pero por supuesto organicé mis ideas primero en inglés porque la charla era basada en un capítulo de mi libro, se llama Social Media in Northern Chile, que aparecerá en 2016 con University College London Press. Después de la charla, creé pdfs de la información que presenté, con los imagines, ahora en este sitio, en español aquí y en English here. 

“I joined a protest group!” Andres proclaimed proudly, knowing that I tend to be a loud proponent of the right of individuals to shake things up with collective action.

“What are you protesting?” I asked, and he pulled out his cracked Samsung Galaxy to show me. He opened Whatsapp and handed me the phone, where I read a brief manifesto in opposition to the construction of a parking lot for Bolivian trucks in Arica. “They’re going to spend 3.2 million dollars on a parking lot! And not for Chileans. For Bolivians. Do you think Bolivia has parking lots for Chilean vehicles? Or are there parking lots for us in Argentina and Colombia? No! With that money they could build homes, they could feed how many families for a year, they could fix the roads.”

Though a parking lot for Bolivian trucks may seem like a silly issue (and a strange one to those unfamiliar with Bolivian/Chilean politics), it cuts to the heart of much deeper issues of nationalism. The two countries are currently waiting for International Court of Justice at The Hague to decide if they will consider Bolivia’s claim to renegotiate coastal access, which was lost in the War of the Pacific in the late 1800s (see my Primer on the Bolivian-Chilean Maritime Conflict). Bolivia claims that, through they ceded the coastline in a 1904 treaty, Chile is obligated to negotiate coastal access based on Chile’s offers to sea access long after the treaty was enforced (see article in The Economist). 

While on the surface this is a dispute about trade and more than a century’s worth of lost GDP (not to mention the copper fields Bolivia lost in the war, which currently make up more than 30% of Chile’s export market). There are deeply nationalistic emotions that arise in these debates as well. Even for lower middle class Bolivians and Chileans—the type of people who would see little to no change in economic terms—are deeply invested in these issues. Many Bolivians see Chileans as arrogant local imperialists, publishing books such as Chile Depredador [Chile, the Predator]. Many Chileans, particularly in the northern region near the border with Bolivia, see Bolivians as backwards and uneducated, looking to get ahead by taking advantage of Chile’s resources, either by immigrating to work or trying to take a coastline that is rightfully Chilean. While for a few, solidarity across borders relies on class (see my blog on The Border: A view from Facebook), the grand majority of these national citizens have internalized their nationalism to the extent that their own lack of benefits from the arrangement and the similarities between lower middle class citizens on both sides of the border are simply overlooked.

This is particularly perplexing, given that northerners’ relationship with nationalism is rarely straightforward. Regional affiliation is usually much more important than national, as many feel disenfranchised from national politics and overlooked by the national government who simply extracts resources and money from the northern region’s copper mines, while leaving the people without social services. Yet there is strong identification with Chileanness when related to cultural forms such as food, sport, and heritage. This may be largly thanks to the process of “Chileanization” enacted in the territory when it was transferred to Chilean control in 1883. To mitigate resentment towards the military and new nation as a whole, the Chilean government launched a projects aimed at incorporating the northern population into the nation-state through religion and education for both children and adults, with mestizaje and modernization at the core of the country’s nationalist discourse. 

Even today, discourses of modernity undergird the tensions between Chilean and Bolivian citizens. The conflation of nation, modernity, and race means that for northern Chileans, they represent modern mestizo subjects, while Bolivians are poor, traditional, and indigenous (which is particularly amplified by Bolivia’s recent symbolic valorization of indigeneity under Evo Morales and the MAS government).

The border dispute, for these citizens that stand little chance of material benefit or loss from a renegotiation, is important because it cuts to the root of self-understanding. To cede a border to Bolivia would mean defeat by a country and people who not only are behind in terms of modernization, but use that as an excuse to extract resources that rightfully belong to Chileans (there are certainly parallels here with discourses about Mexican and Central American immigrants to the United States). For Bolivians, Chile’s unwillingness to open negotiations is simply evidence that the nation and its residents remain unrepentant (and at times racist) thieves.

So then, why is a parking lot so important? Not only, as Andres pointed out could that money, taken from Chilean taxes (and thus rightfully belonging to Chileans), be used for something to benefit Chileans, but ceding something to Bolivians admits that perhaps there is a need for negotiation. And those negotiations are not only about access to maritime trade, but are about what it means to be a modern mestizo citizen.

This belonging was closely associated with conceptions of social and economic class, which were almost always highlighted, claiming solidarity with working class and non-cosmopolitan lifestyle. At times this even led to cross-border identifications in which perceptions of common class and proletariat ideals superseded national identification. Similarly, differences in race and particularly indigeneity were often erased in service of highlighting a broader sense of marginality, in which most Hospiceños could claim a part, rather than compartmentalizing or hierarchizing forms of disadvantage.

Further Reading

A Primer on the Bolivian-Chilean Maritime Conflict
The Peruvian-Chilean Maritime Border: A View from Facebook

The Economist - Bolivia's Access to the Sea
The Economist - The Economics of Landlocked Countries

Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Cástulo Martínez, Chile Depredador (La Paz: Librería Editorial G.U.M., 2010, 3er ed).

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.

read the rest of this entry on the WHY WE POST blog