Disrupções e regulações em circuitos e circulações difusas: a construção do caso sobre o boato da bruxa de Guarujá

Abstract

This dissertation is structured around a diagram that relates three semio-technical media, viz. the Guarujá Alerta Facebbok page, the Folha.com news site, and their respective sections of comments. It makes observations and inferences about the construction of meaning when these media are involved in interactions around the rumor about the so-called “Guarujá Witch” (2014). Its methodological perspective is the concept of mediatization, specifically when discussing digital media. The construction of the academic case is a process that relates methodological contributions, creative and existential inferences, circular analogies and the definition of three research propositions. The first proposition suggests that the constructions of meaning around that case develop based on interactions between the three media analyzed here, which are in contact with tangential media, given the relational nature of the media environment. The second proposition indicates that the Facebook page and the news site employ different strategies to enable web surfers to access their systems, which is a situation that gives rise to self-regulatory devices, as well as conflicts between production and productive reception. The third proposition reveals attempts by mediatized social actors at finding those who were guilty for the culmination of the rumors in a murder. The study identifies a symbolic object called “blaming”, which, however, does not present itself in a static and consensual manner throughout the case analyzed here, but acquires different contours and interpretive perspectives based on its association with other elements that are put into circulation in the discursive market. The analysis focuses on the concepts of circulation, mediatization, rumor, uncertainty and disruption and shows the degenerative potential associated with the way the media function, although the latter also provide regulatory information. This reiterates the mediating place that is still reserved for canonical journalism in a time of non-distinction between producers and receivers of semio-technical media.