Digital Media, Memory and Heritage in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1970s, Brazil's authorities have regarded the country's past as a source of cultural and economic value. In the late 2000s, a boom in Brazil's consumer economy served to make smartphones and social media ubiquitous across the country. This study considers how these two key phenomena intersect in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro through examination of how a range of cultural-historical projects - including an Instagram page, virtual museum, and memory tourism app - use digital media to explore Rio's past. By exploring these two developments, this work sheds new light on how engagement with digital media currently plays a central role in remapping Rio's space. At the same time, through its attention to how historical, social, and economic factors condition the affordances and usage of digital technologies in Rio, it offers a multifaceted portrait of how the initiatives examined both key into and contest longstanding and often exclusionary approaches to the management of Rio's space.

Victoria Adams is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies of the University of Leeds and was previously a Research Associate at the School of Modern Languages of the University of Bristol. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics of the University of Cambridge.