Since the 1990s, studies have been developed with the aim of understanding citizen participation in e-government, e-citizenship experiences, etc. Motivated by this context of reflexivity, governments began to be questioned about their management, to account for public debates and implement public policies through digital communication. Also strongly, and in this same time frame, city governments start to invest in self-promotion strategies in these territories in order to attract tourists in place branding strategies. Faced with this phenomenon, this chapter intends to reflect on the existing tensions between digital communication strategies focus on citizens and tourists in Brazil. It intends to identify the approximations and distances in the strategic communication developed by some Brazilian city governments, in one side, to animates citizen's public opinion in order to constructs public policies and, in the other hand, to position the cities as attractive tourist destinations for visitors.
TopIntroduction
The Latin American researcher Nestor Garcia Canlicini (1998) develops two key notions to understand the interdependence of globalization with space and time.
“The most radical searches for what it means to be entering and leaving modernity are those that acknowledge the tensions between deterritorialization and reterritorialization. By this I refer to two processes: the loss of the “natural” relationship of culture with geographic and social territories and, at the same time, certain relative, partial territorial relocations of old and new symbolic productions” (Canclini, 1998, p. 37).
At the same time, as the barriers between time and space are softened, the production of knowledge becomes even more specialized and makes expert systems emerge (Giddens, 1991). Advances from a technological point of view are linked to communication and the social and our relationship with space and time is increasingly relativized. This entire paradigm shift led to the appearance of “non-places”: “(...) by “non-place” we designate two complementary but distinct realities: spaces constituted in relation to certain purposes (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and the relationship that individuals maintain with these spaces (...) (Augé, 2012, p.87) These spaces are also: “(...), those we borrow when we drive on the highway, shop at the supermarket or we wait at an airport for the next flight (...)” (Augé, 2012, p.88).
We are increasingly tied to shared spaces that are similar across the globe. Airport lounges, subways, elevators, movie theaters, shopping malls, among many other spaces, are not endowed with local particularities and could be anywhere in the world. The Vinci Airport Network, for example, helps to spread these non-places. This organization operates more than 36 airports worldwide, including: 13 in France, 10 in Portugal, three in Cambodia, two in Japan, six in the Dominican Republic, one in Chile and Brazil. The consumption of goods and services, in turn, and because they are increasingly similar, make us part of the same group of consumers, like fast food companies. To some extent, these marks and not places (Augé, 2012) help to make common symbolic productions that could, on the contrary, stimulate symbolic exchanges between identity/alterity (Hall, 2006) in these territories.
These dynamics described so far are likely to be observed in “late modernity”. For Anthony Giddens (1991) and Stuart Hall (2006), it is characterized in some axes of discussion that can be related to issues of cultural identities. Among them, we highlight: a) the accentuation in the reflexivity of individuals added to the processes of deterritorialization and disembedding that configure the discussions about cultural identities because, “(...) it removes social activity from localized contexts, reorganizing social relations through large time-spatial distances” (Giddens, 1991, p.58); b) the presence of online media and social networks, and in particular advertising, as a form of interaction and circulation of cultural products; c) the discussions and the clash between the global and the local that mark cultural identities in late modernity; and finally, d) a new interest in the 'local', since among the globalization strategies is the creation of market 'niches', in the relationship between the regional and the global, providing and demanding the negotiation of identities.
In Brazil, the geographer Milton Santos (2003) presented a good part of these criticisms pointed out so far, but related to peripheral countries. Santos (2003) proposes another Globalization to territories in which it is necessary to revisit local dynamics in order to better relate to these global issues. Even with all the advances in communication technologies, this did not reduce social problems and the world continues to be unequal.