Navegantes e surfistas: as curvaturas do ciberespaço nas vizinhanças dos portais

Abstract

The starting point for this reasearch is a free-space built around principles of freedom and cooperation, an environment where may be exerted freedom of being (or pretend), of saying (or writting) and of listening (or reading). The massive growth in use of Internet has built, for better or worse, a social (virtual) contradictorial and varied space. Here certain strenghths have been at work, whoose purpose seems to be homogenise (or possibly pasteurise) a land-free-of-difference . Among these, a special place is occupied by what has been called general interests portals . The latter websites seek to provide answers to several desires. Their aim is to ensure that the most probable wishes of it s users are satisfied inside it s domains. Thus these websites are built as enterprises, whoose success depends upon the user s navigational behavior control. In this particular case this cannot be achieved except by (persuasive) discourse. My research hipothesis might thus have easily seen: what if this is not just a control done through discourse but also a control of discourse? What we assume here is, evidently, that such websites form a special category of language artifacts created inside determined communicative events, e. g., an emerging discoursive genre. Thus the primary objective of the present research was to determine whether the portal s discourse functioning mode contributed in altering the navigation habits of its users, bending and distorting cyberspace in its surroundings. Therefore, an effort was made to focus on what have been defined as rhetoric atractors. These are those (discoursive) strategies meant to seduce, convince or even deceive the users in order to assure their permancence in the portal s orbit. These strategies, in turn, make the same websites carriers of the order of discourse, an element that controls the typical chaos of the cyberspace, an agent of exorcism of difference and domination of the un restrained discourse