Registro, interação e accountability: O WhatsApp na comunicação da Polícia Militar do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The research investigates the impact of introducing networking tools, such as mobile applications, into a public organization. The objective is to analyze the specific case of WhatsApp participation in the Military Police of the State of Rio de Janeiro, a corporation of high media interest and that interferes daily and deeply in the social dynamics of cities. The central argument is subdivided into three axes: the impact of the advent of the application on the troop; between the commanders and their relations with other police officers, the press and civil society, and finally, the challenges that the actant imposed on the management of information by the corporation and other instances of power of the State Public Security Secretariat. The hypothesis is that new communication practices have enabled the meeting of gaps for speech in a structure so marked by the interdiction of expression, proper to the military ethos. If the WhatsApp competes for the meeting of maneuver spaces in the military hierarchy, it would be possible that, in specific situations, the horizontalisation of the discourse between the corporation and the different social actors occurred, leading to new possibilities of power distribution. What changes in PMERJ's communication flow can be seen from the participation of the application? How can the change in the communication apparatus affect the relations of the institution that is the legal depository of the use of force by the State? How has the application in question also been appropriated by the corporation? These are some of the questions that guide the research. Traces of interactions involving Whatsapp, police officers and their audiences were investigated in order to identify new patterns of movement in the corporate network and their impact on the strength of the links, conditions and work mode of both the Communications Coordination and PMERJ as a whole. The choice of the theoretical-methodological base of the sociology of associations, more specifically by the Actor-Network Theory, by Bruno Latour, leads to a detailed description of the routines of which the actant participates, working less as defining the communicational status of the institution and more as a map of relations, in order to open the way for the understanding of the consequent appropriations of power arising from established connections