A função mediadora das hashtags no processo de impeachment de Dilma Rousseff: semiose e transmídia

Abstract

Hashtags have expanded their initial Twitter tracking function to become agents in producing meaning in a variety of multi-platform media instances. They have been widely used in global contexts of sociopolitical mobilization, inhabiting interstitial spaces between online and offline environments. We understand hashtags as semiosis processes that articulate common positions in media connections. Its vitality depends on the habit of the sign generated through social engagement, which brings contradictions and ambivalences to the communicational process. Based on this understanding, we sought to assess how and to what extent the mediation of sociopolitical hashtags, during the impeachment process of former President Dilma Rousseff, characterized a transmedia dynamic, configuring itself as a resource for the expansion of related narratives. This research is based on the hypothesis that the mediating function of this type of hashtag forms a transmedia dynamic. We use the pragmatism and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) as a theoretical and methodological support in order to observe the semiosis (signic processes) of impeachment through the chain of hashtags. To understand this function, we delimit the corpus according to a simple and systematic observation in facts of 2016. We collect the main hashtags related to the voting dates of impeachment in the Parliamentary Chamber and the Federal Senate. We have developed a case study of the hashtags #NaoVaiTerGolpe [#ThereWontBeACoup] and #ForaDilma [#OutDilma] for having permeated all the moments investigated, being responsible for the creation of related topics that significantly extended the narratives around the process of impeachment. During this course, they became symbols of the prevailing political polarization between those who were against and in favor of the former president's removal. The way they relate to other hashtags in the production of meanings has often altered the course of semiosis. The methodological procedures for the observation of these hashtags were divided into two stages. The first one was based on the monitoring provided using automated collection tools in Twitter, being essential for the identification of the sign associations produced by the two hashtags and their main influencing profiles. Complementarily, we observed Twitter's trends to understand which hashtags dominated the social agenda on the stipulated dates. The second stage was carried out with the help of a retroactive collection tool on Twitter, developed by the Laboratory of Image and Cyberculture Studies (Labic) of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), being able to understand the audience peaks of each hashtag, create tag clouds and verify sign association. In addition, we have collected manuals on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to observe the semiotic specificity of cross-platform hashtags. We seek to understand and characterize the notions of transmedia, mobilization, social engagement, participation, positioning, polarization and mediation. We understand semiosis as a political process that encompasses the signic disputes between competing beliefs, identified by the formation of provisional habits of action in multiplatform. The narratives of the defense of impeachment and the coup hypothesis were related to the seductive images of public personalities, which figure in the social imaginary, contributing to the fixation of the belief. The results point to an approximation between the transmedia logic and the recursive logic of semiosis, inferred by the flow generated in the processes of signification. The trajectories traced by the hashtags under study promoted the differential in the logical enhancement of impeachment semiosis, which were re-signified by the combination of strategies and tactics in the connection between the occupied spaces and the debates on social networks.