Funnily enough, você itself was once more formal, having been a contraction of "vossa mercê."
I'm surprised to hear that your family did not use formal language even in prayer. May I ask what religion(s) you grew up practicing? Catholic prayers often use antiquated, formal language (like "vós"). I don't know enough about Candomblé, but at least Nagô Candomblé is pretty highly formalized in the sense that Yorùbá is the liturgical language.
The "Doutor/Doutora" thing bothers me. I see it all the time with my in-laws empregadas, who use it to refer to my father-in-law (who's an MD) and my mother-in-law (who isn't). It feels weirdly obsequious in that context, even though there's a very clear power and class hierarchy.
Things like Titans of Space [0] and Wooorld [1] are good examples. The sweet spot is apps that let you physically experience things that are otherwise impossible as a learning experience, rather than trying to understand it as dry abstract concepts.
I'm curious to see how this all plays out across different disciplines. The process of learning calculus is different from learning a language, which is different from learning the history of science, which is different from learning ethnographic methods.
There are all kinds of self-interested reasons educators might resist some of these technologies. But this also seems to be one of the areas where people from the tech world impose some idea that could potentially work for their limited domains of expertise but don't work at all for others.
While we can't blame colonialism for everything, "tribalism" throughout much of Africa is as much a product of colonial strategy (divide and conquer) as it is precolonial tension. British colonial administrators mastered this strategy.
Counters used to be a standard feature on personal websites. Also, the fact that there were far fewer, and that they one typically discovered other sites through shared weird interests or sheer luck changed the whole dynamic.
Are people defending WhatsApp, or just saying its widely used? In the places I go, you use it for everything from contacting friends to messaging businesses to schedule appointments. It's unavoidable.
I'm surprised to hear that your family did not use formal language even in prayer. May I ask what religion(s) you grew up practicing? Catholic prayers often use antiquated, formal language (like "vós"). I don't know enough about Candomblé, but at least Nagô Candomblé is pretty highly formalized in the sense that Yorùbá is the liturgical language.
The "Doutor/Doutora" thing bothers me. I see it all the time with my in-laws empregadas, who use it to refer to my father-in-law (who's an MD) and my mother-in-law (who isn't). It feels weirdly obsequious in that context, even though there's a very clear power and class hierarchy.