Mending the past, dreaming the future: representations of the early internet in Brazilian media, 1994–1996

This article analyses how Brazil’s early Internet was represented in two distinct sectors of its cultural field: television drama and print journalism. Focusing on Glória Perez’s Explode Coração (Rede Globo, 1995–96) and Maria Ercília’s Netvox column in Folha de São Paulo, it applies Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how media institutions with different forms of autonomy and capital framed the same technological event. The comparison is not empirical excess but a theoretical strategy to reveal how field positions may condition representations of technology. While Globo presented the Internet as a space of emotional release and consumer aspiration, Folha approached it as a question of market forces versus the State and national dependency. Both cases show how long-standing beliefs in modernisation as redemption persisted under different guises. By identifying this continuity as a national doxa of modernisation, the article demonstrates how imported technologies become locally meaningful within Brazil’s field of cultural production. The study contributes to the global history of the Internet by showing how peripheral contexts rework technoscientific imaginaries according to their own symbolic hierarchies and historical aspirations.