Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

Recent productions such as The Social Dilemma have helped diffuse to a wider public the notion that contemporary forms of political polarization and disinformation may have something to do with how platforms and their algorithmic systems are deeply altering infrastructures of knowledge and subjectivity production everywhere. Proposed solutions cover a broad spectrum, ranging from government and multilateral regulation of Big Tech to changes internal to the industry itself towards alternative business models and platform architectures. On the user end, new forms of digital literacy better adapted to the current media ecology are deemed necessary. This presentation draws on research on populist politics and conspiratorial thinking in the new right ecosystem in Brazil to discuss some of the ways in which platform architectures afford emerging epistemic styles that are highly counterintuitive to how the production of truth, authenticity and spontaneity was understood in previous, science-based expert systems. Particularly key is the paradoxical way in which contemporary new media delegate epistemic responsibility and sovereignty to individual users, while offering a non-transparent environment purposefully designed for the production of influence effects. The presentation discusses three epistemic dimensions of such technical infrastructures that are particularly challenging to crafting new forms of user-based digital literacy: a paradoxical temporality of permanent crisis; a personalized networked spatiality; and a multi-layered topology of ‘refracted publics’ biased towards anti-structural drives and inversions.