Last Thursday there was this documentary on Channel 4, “Cocaine”. It was about the drugs trade in a favela in Brazil. There was this man who had been a dealer but left, his nephew who was in the gang and the whole family was trying to get him out of that life, and a few interviews with members of the gang too, including the nephew of the man, too.

It had everything, even a final twist like in films: the boy owed £120 (or so said the subtitles) because he had lent the money to some friend that had run away with it, but he was responsible in front of the gang. After some build-up, we learnt that the boy was killed, as is the usual policy in such cases apparently.

As the program finished, there was this announcement that you could go to the website and meet the producer on a chat room. I was going to do some work on the internet anyway, so there I went. Strange. First this java applet comes up. I only installed java lately, and I remember trying dozens of times because it was damn difficult, and it is only necessary for certain complicated functions of OpenOffice anyway. But this chat works with java, will it mean that if you do not have it you would not be able to participate in the advertised website? I do not know.

Then two chat rooms came up. One was to ask questions to the producer, the other to talk among us, people who were waiting our turn to ask our questions. I typed a question for the chat with the producer and it never came up my screen.

So I turned to the one where people would speak to each other. People were commenting the documentary and asking questions too, probably thinking that from one room, they would be moderated into the other. One person asked something like, “didn't it occur to the production team to pay off the boy's debt? It is hardly the price of a business lunch...” Then more people started to echo this question, or asking questions similar to it.

In the meantime, the producer was in this other room answering technical questions, or questions in the line of “did you feel threatened by the gang of drug dealers? Did you feel safe?” and someone suggested he was hiding away from this question that so many people had asked.

I went to work with other things while leaving the chat open. Suddenly, I received this notification that I was no longer on the “cocaine” chat. We were all being transferred to another chat room! I could see all these other people joining the same room as me, and someone asked what was this avalanche of newcomers.

The two previous chat rooms had disappeared from my screen. Some people suggested we had been chucked from the chat room because we were asking uncomfortable questions. Others said that it had been announced that the chat would be for only half hour. Whatever really happened, no one ever explained.

Thanks channel 4 for bringing us such telling experiences :-)