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Community organizes to revive neighborhood bars, offering an alternative to screen time
🇦🇷 Argentina /Culture & Society

Community organizes to revive neighborhood bars, offering an alternative to screen time

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Context piece
  • Martina Alfuso created "Bar de Viejes," a community movement aiming to revive neighborhood bars and combat screen-induced isolation.
  • The initiative maps bars across Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, organizing events like "Bar Abierto" to foster human connection and spontaneous experiences.
  • Alfuso criticizes the algorithm-driven nature of social media, advocating for physical spaces like bars as essential for critical thinking and genuine social interaction.

Martina Alfuso, a literature graduate, champions "Bar de Viejes," a movement she founded to counteract the isolating effects of digital screens by revitalizing neighborhood bars. "The resistance today is not having an Instagram account; you can say, 'Let's go to the cinema,' and stop watching Netflix," she asserts, emphasizing a return to physical, shared experiences.

Since 2018, Alfuso and her community have documented over 1,300 bars in Buenos Aires, Brazil, and Uruguay. Her bi-weekly newsletter, "Voy al Bar," reaches 3,000 subscribers, offering theoretical underpinnings for her project, which links movement and action. She critiques the constant digital stimulation, finding value in the "unpredictable" events that occur in bars, spaces she believes still allow for improvisation and genuine human interaction.

"Bar de Viejes" has organized "Bar Abierto" events in 34 bars across cities like Córdoba, Rosario, and Buenos Aires since 2021. This year, the project evolves with "El Club Atlético Bar de Viejes," a new phase launching November 14th. This initiative already involves ten member bars hosting activities, aiming to create spaces for community gathering and combat the closure of these "islands of bohemian and ephemeral happiness."

Alfuso argues that digital algorithms limit experiences by showing users only what aligns with their existing tastes, hindering experimentation and exposure to "alterity." She contrasts this with bars, which she describes as "a social network, not a digital one," offering opportunities for surprise and genuine connection. "Our brain isn't functioning as we're proposing it should: attending to multiple stimuli simultaneously," she notes, highlighting the need for more focused, real-world interactions.

El algoritmo sólo te muestra lo que se parece a vos, a tus gustos, no te permite experimentar, ni sentir la alteridad

— Martina AlfusoCriticizing the limitations of social media algorithms.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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