Crioulas Media: Technology, Language and Identity in a Quilombola Community in Brazil
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In this chapter we intend to discuss issues around the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by info-excluded communities, using the example of the experience of a Quilombola community in Brazil and the intercultural movement Identidades. The community is located in Conceição das Crioulas in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The struggle for land possession, led primarily by women, represents 200 years of the community history. Depleted at various levels, organized around a subsistence economy, the community additionally faces gender equality problems and the severity of a dry and arid land. With a history of conflict – including the construction of their Quilombola identity – their tradition of participatory decision-making, which transformed them into a nationally studied model, created in the population the need to access the means to tell their own history and also to serve their struggles and collective aspirations. That need brought the community together with Identidades. From the shared experience emerged in the community, in 2005, the Crioulas Video, a group of young people who then began to contact with ICT. Nowadays they are the first Quilombola producers, who use in an autonomous and independent manner, video, photography and the web as a means of expression. This chapter will examine the impact of ICT and the consequences in terms of power, culture, language and identity using Conceição das Crioulas collective experience as a reference. It will question the implementation of technologies that were developed from Western models, ignoring and excluding other societies and cultures such as the referred community. The Internet is the media that carries and expands these technologies. In this sense, we analyse the characteristics of this medium, its patterns, the distance of its apparent universality and what it discriminates by giving particular focus on the interfaces that operate within.