A quase conversação na comentosfera dos j-blogs : um estudo das interações na interface de comentários de quatro blogs jornalísticos institucionais

Abstract

The present work lies on the borderline between Linguistics and Communication Studies. It aims to investigate the interactions within the comments published by readers at four institutional journalism blogs: Blog Noblat MiriamLeitão.com Blog, Blog do Reinaldo Azevedo Blog and Josias de Souza. It attempts to define which Involvement strategies are used by the readers comments to relate to the blog author (the blogger ), to other readers who also publish their opinions ( reader/commentators ) and to the topic of the text (the post ). Moreover,he purpose of this re search is to clarify whether or not real conversation occurs within the comments window, in terms of the criteria described by authors of Communication Studies. To this end, a corpus of 400 comments was compiled whose content demonstrates readers critical views. All the comments deal with the same theme: the blackout which occurred on November 10th 2009 in 18 Brazilian states. Such messages have been analyzed from a predominantly qualitative method based on the interpretation of the data, but a quantitative approach have also been considered to allow for more comprehensive and comparative data. In the absence of a theoretical linguistics framework which could cover the interactional phenomena identified within the comments sections of blogs, a proposal of empirical analysis based on Eggins and Slade (1997) was developed, which guided the entire research. Among the findings of the survey it may be argued that while blogs have inaugurated a new form of relationship between the journalist and their audience, there is, in addition, evidence that most readers use the blogs as a space for the publication of personal opinions, rather than an environment with extensive interactive possibilities