Cyberspace is most often placed by urban theorists in opposition to more traditional ideas of space, like neighbourhood or ‘local community’. For although the term ‘community’ appears frequently in Internet rhetoric, it is used to describe groups that establish ‘virtual’ connections based on affinities other than living near each other – professional, intellectual, leisure, and consumption affinities being the most common ones. Discussing the modern megalopolis, Néstor García Canclini states that ‘social identification is more and more based on semiotic models provided by the culture industry rather than on the signifying structures or the temporality of the neighbourhood’ (García Canclini 1998: 27). Manuel Castells, in turn, points to a social division between the two types of communities in his description of the contemporary megalopolis as a ‘dual city’, where the elites establish network connections with the whole world, leaving the poor and displaced to develop internal networks of survival (Castells 1989: 227–28).

The youth from Capão Redondo, a poor neighbourhood on the south side of São Paulo, defy such oppositions. They create forms of social identity that are intensely local while belonging, at the same time, to international networks related to contemporary youth culture in many of its manifestations: hip-hop, video and computer games, ‘marginal literature’, and cyberspace. This chapter will focus on the website www.capao.com.br (hereafter referred to as Capao. com) founded in 2000 by the brothers Leonardo and Allan Lopes to inspire pride in the neighbourhood. Since this website is intimately connected with hip-hop and the ‘marginal literature’ of Capão, it will be discussed as part of a growing phenomenon that began towards the end of the 1980s, when a few hip-hop groups began to appear in Capão Redondo. The most successful of these was Racionais MCs, whose fourth record, ‘Vivendo no inferno’ [Living in Hell] (1993) sold millions of copies to listeners from all social classes and from all parts of the country, and received many prizes. In 2000 Ferréz, himself a rapper, published the novel Capão pecado [Sin Capão] which describes everyday violence in Capão Redondo. The novel includes vignettes introducing each chapter by many of the most important rappers from the region, among them Mano Brown, from Racionais MCs, and Conceito Moral [Moral Concept].