Whew. I can devote another week to soccer lore. OMG! This is all true. I heard it on
On the Media this week. Listen if you can because it is LOL funny! The
New York Times also reported the story and gave this
YouTube link. As someone who has recently been listening to and reading about much that is negative about social media and the internet, I just love it. When you need some cheering up, start following! some of the links or google some of the terms in the articles.
BOB GARFIELD: Carlos Eduardo dos Santos Galvao Bueno is a play-by-play announcer who calls the World Cup matches on Brazil’s largest TV network, Rede Globo. Last weekend, someone in Brazil offered a blunt critique of Galvao’s broadcasting style with a three-word Tweet in Portuguese: “Cala Boca Galvao,” or, in English, “Shut up, Galvao.”
The phrase quickly became one of the top worldwide trending topics in the Twittersphere, and what happened next, says Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was the result of a wired world eavesdropping uncomprehendingly on one another’s conversations.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: For the last three or four days, “
Cala Boca Galvao” has been absolutely at the top of the topic list. And so, what happened was a lot of non-Portuguese speakers saw this phrase, didn't know what it meant and started Tweeting, what does
Cala Boca Galvao mean?
If there’s a new topic trending on Twitter, there’s probably a significant chance that it has something to do with Lady Gaga. So some of the Brazilians grabbed that idea and started telling the non-Portuguese speakers that Cala Boca Galvao is the new Lady Gaga single. …
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: To the best of our knowledge, Lady Gaga has never consciously recorded a single called Cala Boca Galvao. But this is, of course, the wonder of the Internet. It’s that if you now go onto YouTube, you will find half a dozen purported Lady Gaga Cala Boca Galvaos.
The real tour de force in all of this was someone realizing that you can't go wrong on Twitter coming up with a worthy, well-meaning cause for people to get behind. And so, you started to have some very clever Brazilian saying that Cala Boca Galvao is an international campaign to save the rare endangered Galvao bird, and that if you were to join in and Tweet “Cala Boca Galvao,” 10 cents would be donated to the Save the Galvao Foundation. And quite rapidly, Brazilians started to come up with some wonderful supporting materials for this.
So you can find a poster that declares “Help Us Save Galvao Birds. One Second to Tweet, One Second to Save a Life.”
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: A campaign to raise money to create hermetically sealed birdhouses to allow the birds to survive.
BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] So this is a hoax built upon a hoax, stemming from an insult, at this stage.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Look, in seriousness, what’s so amazing about a space like Twitter is that one click away are all of these conversations that you don't know anything about. …
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: One of the great functions of sport is that it gives you common ground where you can talk to people from countries all over the world. The World Cup becomes this sort of wonderful excuse for conversation across national lines, sometimes even across language lines. And a lot of that conversation has to do with taunting one another. So I view this as a very well-constructed taunt.
