I’ll admit that Web 2.0 advocates can be a bit too sanguine in their vision of a networked participatory future. But what makes the proliferation of information technology so exciting is the ability to easily capture and disseminate what James Scott calls the “hidden transcript” of marginalized people’s all over the world.

TechPresident reports on a project called Viva Favella, an effort by Brazilian journalists to document life in Brazil’s fabled low-income neigborhoods. The site is:

The first Internet portal in Brazil designed exclusively around the needs and interests of low-income communities, Viva Favela has a team made up of journalists and “community correspondents” – favela residents qualified to act as reporters and photographers.

With their “inside” perspective, they help expose all of the human, historical, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of these areas.

Sites like these empower communities to be able to structure the ways in which they present themselves to the world. However, making a hidden transcript visible doesn’t necessarily do much to alter power relations. The key question is how do Web 2.0 tools affect the ways in which marginalized peoples are socially constructed. There are strong power dynamics that support and reinforce specific stories of “favella as slum.” Of interest is how these local indigenous images merged with a rhetorical campaign to re-frame perceptions in ways that alter power relations?