Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Considering that the major emotion which had shaped the perception of violence on news coverage in Brazil has been displaced from fear to anger through the last years, we research the meaning of this apparently recent increase in consumption of videos on social media which show violence. For this paper, we studied the case of a teenager in São Paulo, tattooed on his forehead by force, as revenge for a supposed bicycle robbery attempt. Assuming this episode as part of a lynch mob epidemic in the country, we try to follow the traces of haters’ discourse on the digital environment of social media, using Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s intertextuality concepts, in order to build a map of anger and of attributed causes for these attacks (as justified in this web of discourse). We argue that the perception of impunity in Brazil, promoted by newspapers, may be one of the explanations for this new random – or not so ramdomic - target for hate. As a background concern, we ask whether the country has been living a rising culture of anger, exceptional or not, from its historical and structurally violent feature.