Imagens-totens: a fixação de símbolos nos processos de midiatização

Abstract

More and more the same images are shown in media devices, be it journalistic institutions or individual actors in a replicating and reverberating way. In face of this insertion on circulation, this work has as its central theme the image in its materiality, in relation or not with verbal texts that are in stake, which summon interior images or deeper structures belonging to social knowledge and culture. From the concepts of media coverage of Verón, Fausto Neto, Braga and Ferreira’s concept of circulation, one realizes that this is not a study about how to make journalism itself, but it is about the fields of action that are in stake on the circulation of journalistic images. Based on exploratory analysis of the three cases which compose the corpus of this research (September 11, Saddam Hussein and Michael Jackson), transformed into collections, concepts have been put in motion to observe the processes of image mediatization and their symbolic force applying references from Bordieu, Flusser, Cassirer and Durand. Thus, what gets discussed in this thesis is not, simply, the place of the devices, but mainly of the circulation. But how can it be understood? The focus to think about the circulation is distribution, namely, to comprehend the distribution of inscribed images on multiple devices and, on this process, one can realize the inscription of certain images as symbolic places, defining uses and social interactions of images in media processes. Therefore, if, on one hand,the circulation derives from aggregated values in the production and in the reception of these distributed images, one apprehends that these values aggregate themselves around of what, in the development of this thesis, is called totem images. That is, the organizing proposition, about the object under examination, is that the totemization of images, identifiable in distribution, is circulation in that it results of the production of value (symbolic fixation), falling upon the mediatized communication processes, and, one can infer in the social processes correlate to the theme of the journalistic event. The challenge of this thesis, therefore, is to identify the incidence of mediatization processes on the configuration of socially reaffirmed images as reference of the events.