Travel balance: a mild Covid infection; two epic storms with blackouts; an obscene number of patties; 20 days talking and swimming with the children that the pandemic took away from me.
My longest absence from Brazil came to a successful end, despite the virus encounter I spent two years avoiding in Manhattan.
I asked what effect social isolation between relatives and friends had had. Living as an expat is accepting some degree of isolation, not to be confused with loneliness.
But another isolation seems to have formed at the confluence of the pandemic with the explosion of disinformation motivated by political radicalization in Brazil.
This time, I realized that I no longer share a lingua franca of facts with people I’ve known for decades or watched grow up. It has become clear, in this millennium, that the consumption of digital information has been segregating the public in regrettable ghettos of interests.
This is not nostalgia for the editorial hierarchy. It’s just the realization that the shared reality ecosystem has not yet evolved into one in which information hygiene prevails, and this new activity — denying fake news — doesn’t reach the necessary audience.
I detect in informal conversations about any subject phrases that sound originated in “zaps” messages. Fictions about vaccines transmitted in these echo chambers are repeated by people far more refined than I am in pairing wine with fish entree.
I collect enough clichés, such as “cancel culture”, this one applied to independent thinkers, that I’ve come to feel surrounded by Zeligs. Leonard Zelig is the character in Woody Allen’s 1983 film, a chameleon that transforms into personalities around him. If he had been created in this decade, Zelig would have lived in a cloud of influencer zaps.
It is strange to note educated professionals whose information diet depends on clipping services that decide for them what is relevant.
In New York, I’d only had similar, sporadic experience with Fox News viewers. There is, of course, an entire country I don’t go to, which says I believe Donald Trump is still president. But I remember the comment of a famous former war correspondent and news anchor I interviewed in the 1990s: “We Americans don’t know how knowledgeable you are about the world.”
WhatsApp didn’t hit the ground running there like it did here. Discussing work, sending press releases or approaching almost strangers by “zap” there is a lack of professionalism.
I’ve never had a social life confined to journalists, but even among more distracted friends who couldn’t say who governs Ukraine, there remains a mental square in which journalism is still a source of facts, despite editorial balkanization everywhere.
All my annual trips to Brazil reminded me of a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “O Fauno de Marmore”, nailed to the wall in the office of an old friend who chose to live in Rio: “Between two countries, we have neither, or just that little space between the two, in which, in the end, we rest our discontented bones”.
What will it be like to preserve that little emotional territory of rest if we have to travel from a foreign country to a cognitive dystopia orchestrated by Mark Zuckerberg and the algorithmic oligarchs?
Source: Folha
