Abstract
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are becoming more accessible and widespread, but a considerable portion of the world’s population still has little access to them, and when it does, there are other gaps to be filled—digital literacy being the most relevant one. This chapter analyzes a social and political movement, which took place in Brazil in 2013, known as The June Journeys, as it presents an important instance of ICTs being used to empower society, especially among the youth striving for social change. The Journeys bear a resemblance to movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados in Spain. Data from a local survey with university students illustrates the discussion, which presents the Journeys as part of this new kind of youth political activism driven by technology.
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Notes
- 1.
Local definitions of youth may vary widely (Bastien & Holmarsdottir, 2015). Brazilian Statute of Youth defines it as happening between 15 and 29 years of age.
- 2.
The name was inspired by the June Journeys of 1848, a revolution occurred in France and described by Karl Marx in The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Some analysts of the movement hesitate in the comparison as the Journeys of 2013 did not have the revolutionary character of the original ones, with no major attempt to challenge the democratic institutions (Singer, 2013).
- 3.
It must be noted that Brazil changed its procedures for estimating GDP in 2003, whereas the World Bank has applied the same methodology throughout that period.
- 4.
This organization has been actively advocating free bus ride cards for all students since its inception in 2005 (Melito, 2013). Its birth and activities have been documented in the movie Impasse (2010). It has since rebranded itself as Zero Tariff Organization (retrieved from http://tarifazero.org) and now advocates for entirely free public transportation in all major cities.
- 5.
Lack of interest was the main reason appointed by the students for their non-participation in Messemberg’s survey (2015) and in our own survey as well.
- 6.
The study has been approved by the ethics committee of the university by expedited review, due to the facts that both the survey and the interviews were performed anonymously, that there were no questions considered age-inappropriate, and that all participants were above 18 years old. Participants in the interviews and in the focus group provided a signed consent regarding the uses of the data and received written guarantee of its anonymity.
- 7.
Although we acknowledge that “race” is a highly contended category, it is still the one used in Brazilian official statistics and most academic texts. The category “ethnicity” would not fit in this case, as this classification does not correspond to ethnic groups. Usually in Brazil, when reporting data on race, researchers collapse categories “Black” and “Brown” (pretos e pardos), into the Negro category. We summarize them here as Browns, with 9.55% of the total sample being pretos (blacks) and 31.03% being pardos (mixed), or brown.
- 8.
For those who were members of groups or associations, we asked them to evaluate the level of their participation in a scale of 1 to 10, and the average score was 7.1, regardless of participation in the Journeys.
- 9.
In the original: Sendo as reivindicações legítimas, você concorda com a depredação do patrimônio público [ou privado, na questão seguinte] como forma de protesto?
- 10.
There are other noteworthy distinctions between the two groups. We have chosen not to present them in this chapter, so as to focus in the specific questions raised in this chapter.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Jeannie Yoo and Marcelo N. Fraga for the substantial suggestions on editing and historical material. We thank all sociology students from the Universidade de Brasília who took part both as interviewers and participants in the study presented here.
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Coelho, M.F.P., Collares, A.C.M. (2017). Youth and Politics: The Use of ICTs and the New Political Activism in Brazil. In: Bastien, S., Holmarsdottir, H. (eds) Youth as Architects of Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66275-6_6
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