-
Has anyone among you
ever been exposed to tear gas?
-
Tear gas? Anyone?
-
I'm sorry to hear that, so you might know
that it's a very toxic substance,
-
but you might not know
that it's a very simple molecule
-
with an unpronouncable name:
-
it's called chlorobenzalmalononitrile.
-
I made it.
-
It's decades old, but it's becoming
very trendy among police forces
-
around the planet lately, it seems,
-
and according to my experience
as a non-voluntary breather of it,
-
tear gas has two main
but quite opposite effects.
-
One, it can really burn your eyes,
-
and two, it can also
help you to open them.
-
Tear gas definitely helped
to open mine to something
-
that I want to share
with you this afternoon:
-
that livestreaming the power
of independent broadcasts through the web
-
can be a game-changer in journalism,
-
in activism, and as I see it,
in the political discourse as well.
-
That idea started
to dawn on me in early 2011
-
when I was covering
a protest in São Paulo.
-
It was the marijuana march,
-
a gathering of people asking
for the legalization of cannabis.
-
When that group started to move,
-
the riot police came from the back
with rubber bullets, bombs,
-
and then the gas.
-
But to make a long story short,
-
I had entered that protest
as the editor-in-chief
-
of a well-established printed magazine
where I'd worked for 11 years,
-
and thanks to this unsolicited
effects of tear gas,
-
I left it as a journalist that was now
committed to new ways
-
of sharing the raw experience
of what it's like to be there, actually.
-
So in the following week,
I was back in the streets,
-
but that time, I wasn't a member
of any media outlet anymore.
-
I was there as an independent
livestreamer, and all I had with me
-
was basically borrowed equipment.
-
I had a very simple camera
and a backpack with 3G modems.
-
And I had this weblink
that could be shared through social media,
-
could be put in any website,
-
and that time,
the protest went along fine.
-
There was no violence.
-
There was no action scenes.
-
But there was something really exciting,
-
because I could see at a distance
the TV channels covering it,
-
and they had these big vans
and the teams and the cameras,
-
and I was basically doing the same thing
-
and all I had was a backpack.
-
And that was really
exciting to a journalist,
-
but the most interesting part
was when I got back home, actually,
-
because I learned that I had been watched
-
by more than 90,000 people,
-
and I got hundreds of emails and messages
of people asking me, basically,
-
how did I do it,
-
how it was possible to do such a thing.
-
And I learned something else,
that that was actually the first time
-
that somebody had ever done
a livestreaming in a street protest
-
in the country.
-
And that really shocked me,
-
because I was no geek,
I was no technology guy,
-
and all the equipment needed
was already there,
-
was easily available.
-
And I realized that
we had a frontier here,
-
a very important one,
-
that it was just a matter
of changing the perspective,
-
and the web could be actually used,
-
already used, as a colossal
and uncontrollable
-
and highly anarchical TV channel,
TV network,
-
and anyone with very basic skills
and very basic equipment,
-
even someone like me who had this
little stuttering issue,
-
so if it happens, bear with me please,
-
even someone like me
could become a broadcaster.
-
And that sounded revolutionary in my mind.
-
So for the next couple of years,
-
I started to experiment with
livestreaming in different ways,
-
not only in the streets
but mostly in studios and in homes,
-
until the beginning of 2013, last year,
-
when I became the cofounder of a group
called Mídia NINJA.
-
NINJA is an acronym
-
that stands for Narrativas Independentes
Jornalismo e Ação,
-
or in English, independent narratives,
journalism, and action.
-
It was a media group
that had little media plan.
-
We didn't have any financial structure.
-
We were not planning
to make money out of this,
-
which was wise, because you shouldn't
try to make money out of journalism now.
-
But we had a very solid
and clear conviction,
-
that we knew that the hyperconnected
environment of social media
-
could maybe allow us to consolidate
-
a network of experimental journalists
throughout the country.
-
So we launched a Facebook page first,
and then a manifesto,
-
and started to cover the streets
in a very simple way.
-
But then something happened,
something that wasn't predicted,
-
that no one could have anticipated.
-
Street protests started
to erupt in São Paulo.
-
They began as very local and specific.
-
They were against the bus fare hike
that had just happened in the city.
-
This is a bus.
-
It's written there, "Theft."
-
But those kind of manifestations
started to grow,
-
and they kept happening.
-
So the police violence against them
started to grow as well.
-
But there was another conflict,
-
the one I believe that's
more important here
-
to make my point that
it was a narrative conflict.
-
There was this mainstream media
version of the facts
-
that anyone who was on the streets
could easily challenge
-
if they presented their own vision
of what was actually happening there.
-
And it was this clash of visions,
this clash of narratives,
-
that I think turned those protests
-
into a long period in the country
of political reckoning
-
where hundreds of thousands of people,
-
probably more than a million people
-
took to the streets in the whole country.
-
But it wasn't about
the bus fare hike anymore.
-
It was about everything.
-
The people's demands, their expectations,
-
the reasons why they were on the streets
-
could be as diverse as they could
be contradictory in many cases.
-
If you could read it,
you would understand me.
-
But it was in this environment
of political catharsis
-
that the country was going through
-
that it had to do with politics, indeed,
-
but it had to do also
with a new way of organizing,
-
through a new way of communicating.
-
It was in that environment
that Mídia NINJA emerged
-
from almost anonymity
to become a national phenomenon,
-
because we did have the right equipment.
-
We are not using big cameras.
-
We are using basically this.
-
We are using smartphones.
-
And that, actually, allowed us to become
invisible in the middle of the protests,
-
but it allowed us to do something else:
-
to show what it was like
to be in the protests,
-
to present to people at home
a subjective perspective.
-
But there was something
that is more important,
-
I think, than the equipment.
-
It was our mindset,
-
because we are not behaving
as a media outlet.
-
We are not competing for news.
-
We are trying to encourage people,
-
to invite people,
and to actually teach people
-
how to do this, how they also
could become broadcasters.
-
And that was crucial to turn Media Ninja
from a small group of people,
-
and in a matter of weeks,
-
we multiplied and we grew
exponentially throughout the country.
-
So in a matter of a week or two,
as the protests kept happening,
-
we were hundreds of young people
-
connected in this network
throughout the country.
-
We were covering more than
50 cities at the same time.
-
That's something that
no TV channel could ever do.
-
That was responsible
for turning us suddenly, actually,
-
into kind of the mainstream
media of social media.
-
So we had a couple of thousands
of followers on our Facebook page,
-
and soon we had a quarter
of a million followers.
-
Our posts and our videos
-
were being seen by more than
11 million timelines a week.
-
It was way more than any newspaper
or any magazine could ever do.
-
And that turned Media Ninja
into something else,
-
more than a media outlet,
than a media project.
-
It became almost like a public service
-
to the citizen, to the protester,
-
to the activist,
-
because they had a very simple
and efficient and peaceful tool
-
to confront both police
and media authority.
-
Many of our images started
to be used in regular TV channels.
-
Our livestreams started to be broadcast
even in regular televisions
-
when things got really rough.
-
Some our images were responsible
to take some people out of jail,
-
people who were being arrested unfairly
-
under false accusations,
and we could prove them innocent.
-
And that also turned Mídia NINJA very soon
-
to be seen as almost
an enemy of cops, unfortunately,
-
and we started to be severely beaten,
and eventually arrested on the streets.
-
It happened in many cases.
-
But that was also useful,
because we were still at the web,
-
so that helped to trigger
an important debate in the country
-
on the role of the media itself
-
and the state of the freedom
of the press in the country.
-
So Mídia NINJA now evolved
-
and finally consolidated itself
in what we hoped it would become:
-
a national network
of hundreds of young people,
-
self-organizing themselves locally
-
to cover social, human rights issues,
-
and expressing themselves
not only politically
-
but journalistically.
-
What I started to do
in the beginning of this year,
-
as Mídia NINJA is already
a self-organizing network,
-
I'm dedicating myself to another project.
-
It's called Fluxo,
which is Portuguese for "stream."
-
It's a journalism studio
in São Paulo downtown,
-
where I used livestream to experiment
-
with what I call post-television formats.
-
But I'm also trying to come up with ways
to finance independent journalism
-
through a direct relationship
with an audience,
-
with an active audience,
-
because now I really want
to try to make a living
-
out of my tear gas resolution back then.
-
But there's something
more significant here,
-
something that I believe is more important
and more crucial than my personal example.
-
I said that livestream could turn the web
into a colossal TV network,
-
but I believe it does something else,
-
because after watching people using it,
-
not only to cover things but to express,
to organize themselves politically,
-
I believe livestream can turn cyberspace
into a global political arena
-
where everyone might have a voice,
-
a proper voice,
-
because livestream takes the monopoly
of the broadcast political discourse,
-
of the verbal aspect
of the political dialogue
-
out of the mouths of just politicians
and political pundits alone,
-
and it empowers the citizen
through this direct and non-mediated power
-
of exchanging experiences and dialogue,
-
empowers them to question
and to influence authorities
-
in ways in which we are about to see.
-
And I believe it does something else
that might be even more important,
-
that the simplicity of the technology
can merge objectivity and subjectivity
-
in a very political way, as I see it,
-
because it really helps the audience,
-
the citizen, to see the world
through somebody else's eye,
-
so it helps the citizen
to put him- or herself
-
in other people's place.
-
And that idea, I think,
should be the intention,
-
should be the goal of any good journalism,
any good activism,
-
but most of all, any good politics.
-
Thank you very much. It was an honor.
-
(Applause)