Chapter Two - Orkontros: Brazilian Migrants, Social Network Sites and the European City

Summary

The boom in transportation and communication technology initiated in the last century has drastically changed the social and spatial geography of most European cities. Much in line with the work of Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells describes the new “informational city” as the “urban expression of the whole matrix of determination of the Informational Society, as the Industrial City was the spatial expression of the Industrial Society”. Cities can be seen as hubs in the global network of people, information and goods, and – depending on their centrality in networks of finance, labour, production and information – such a position in the network can have quite some consequences.

While not all cities are affected equally, most cities have witnessed a sustained influence of electronic/digital communication in all domains of social life. Questions relating to urban networks and electronic communication – particularly the Internet – are tightly related to several other important discussions about public life in post-industrial cities, such as, for example, the discussions about the status and future of the multicultural city (partly the consequence of migration patterns) or the debates about civil-political participation in the face of denationalization and transnationalization. Electronic communication increasingly challenges the fit between territory and political community, or as William J. Mitchell put it between the civitas and urbs. “As a result, traditional congruencies of citizenship, public space and spectacle – long vital in the functioning of cities – have been dislocated.”

This essay aims to elucidate the links between new media, the city and the public sphere, through the lens of the online and offline practices of Brazilian migrants in Amsterdam and Barcelona. In particular, I discuss their use of the social network site (SNS) Orkut, powered by Google. I argue that Orkut provides a virtual meeting place for Brazilian migrants in and beyond the cities of residence, thus providing new avenues for social interaction, political conversation and religious exchange. While such transnational avenues seemingly endorse homophilious networking and a tribalization of the public sphere, closer inspection of the everyday lives of the people involved shows that Brazilian migrants engage with socio-political issues of the different societies of which they are part in diverse ways.