“Fala morador!” A periferia na esfera pública e a violência urbana nas páginas hiperlocais

Abstract

This thesis deals with a particular use of Facebook pages by residents of neighborhoods in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro: pages called hyperlocal, which function as spaces for exchanging information and publicizing events that have occurred in the neighborhood, as a result of the expansion of internet access, and the ease of use of social networks. We argue that such vehicles are innovations in communication and cause an extension of the concept of public interest. By selectively evidencing facts that occurred in only one area and not in others, traditional journalism contributed to the fact that cases of violence and other violations that occurred in the peripheries were not generally known and when they were, that they had a very different character from that which inhabitants of these urban areas would give. This negligence constructs the public security facts that occurred in the South Zone as facts of public interest and those that occur in favelas, either as part of its residents' private interests or characterized from a perspective external to the understandings and interests of these citizens. Thus, the thesis questions the idea of the public present in the habermasian theory of the public sphere, demonstrating the embedded normativity that decreases the analytical and normative capacity of the concept. By analyzing the hyperlocal pages, we demonstrate how, despite the limits and criticisms of social networks concerning a degeneration of public debate, these vehicles constitute an insertion of new actors and new perspectives in the public debate. These new perspectives are many and plural, but this thesis focuses specifically on peripheral urban perspectives on its own daily social and political reality, through empirical research that raised and analyzed 236 hyperlocal pages of the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro, its more than 90 thousand posts and the comments received by these posts.