O sistema de representação de atores sociais e as práticas discursivas online de uma associação de moradores

Abstract

The Internet has been used to explore and promote both social and political changes. However, research that incorporates social activism and the role of new technologies is still minimal. This study proposes to analyze the discursive practices of a local association (The Association of Neighbors and Friends of Santa Teresa - AMAST), based on its Facebook page. The background for these discussions is the renovation of the neighborhood tram, the local traditional means of transport. The analytical tool is the representation of social actors, a sociosemantic system developed by van Leeuwen (2008), derived from certain elements of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (2004). The system enables the analysis of how the participants of social practices can be, and are, represented in discourse. A corpus was compiled over two months in 2015 and 2016, based on the interactions published on the AMAST Facebook page, including original posts and their comments. The names of the association members were erased and the corpus was subsequently treated using AntConc3.4.4w (ANTHONY, 2014), a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for both concordancing and text analysis. The three most frequent lexical items were extracted and classified according to the system. The results of the analysis demonstrate that the items tram , neighbor and neighborhood have a central role in the online interactions between AMAST members. It was possible to characterize these items as social actors, taking into account the verbal processes associated with them. When the topic discussed is transportation, the members of the association clearly long for the old tram , with its retractable steps. In addition, there are instances in which the tram is referred to by verbs typical of a human actor. The item neighbors is represented generically as a somewhat passive group of people. The neighborhood is characterized as a peripheral participant who either suffers the consequences of local government negligence, or is associated, in a nostalgic way, to the symbol of the neighborhood, the tram. Certain lexical items, which identify Santa Teresa's surrounding slums, have very low frequency in the online interactions of the association's page, suggesting that the neighborhood´s view of themselves excludes the surrounding slums. The main conclusion of this work, considering these results, is that the page of the association on Facebook does not seem to be a social activism forum but rather a locus of complaining.