O jovem, o Orkut e a escola: suas relações

Abstract

The current study is geared towards the thought on youngsters, Orkut and the school. It aims fundamentally to comprehend the ways of interaction, with which Orkut provides youngsters, and how these means aid them to rethink new configurations for their schools, hence contributing to school practices committed to forming critical and transforming youngsters with a collective view of the world.By confronting my personal views with youngsters different opinions, as a researcher, I concentrated my analysis on the several uses of the immediate-communication Orkut, so as to comprehend how youngsters have built their images, values, identities in a relational ambient, mostly ludic, which expands into a vast net of multiple texts and contexts, and how its repercussions allow them to rethink the school environment. This task was not exhausted as the main theme, yet it also provided an opportunity to construct new relations engendered in the dialogue within the school, developed throughout the research process. Supported by the theoretical-methodological approach, whose foundations lie upon Mikhail Bakhtin s (1992, 2002, 2003) concepts of alterity and dialogism, according to which the other is deemed as the one who affects and provides improvements for the distinct views and comprehension of the world, the dialogue established in the research process was constantly tense. Listening and responses were altered, viewpoints and values were confronted, revealing and permitting the negotiation of senses. This means of researching also allowed intervention, as an education act, distancing the thought from the school environment and the uses of Orkut, favouring, from the other s point of view, the access to different meanings, to face the supposedly true and absolute discourses that pervade school experiences and the uses youngsters make of Orkut, allowing new perceptions, relations and redimensioning.