Fundamentos pragmáticos da teoria ator-rede para análise de ações comunicacionais em redes sociais online

Abstract

This thesis investigates how and to what extent the notion of mediation, delineated by the Actor- Network Theory (ANT), contributes to characterize communicational actions in online social networks by specifying the communicational sense of sociotechnical actions in these networks, by apprehending them as sociotechnical networks and describing their affordances. The descriptive and literature review methods help to define communicational action. For ANT, humans and non-humans affect each other. The action of these actors or actants, those that make others act, is defined as association or linking, from which the social results. ANT investigates actions, without predetermining actors. This impacts on the definition of communication, distributed between humans and non-humans in online social networks. By making others do both are mediators. Mediation is the action that alters what is transported and the senses produced. According to TAR, mediation has four meanings: translation, composition, irreversion and delegation. The theoretical hypothesis is that communication configures the fifth sense of mediation by emphasizing the agency of actants in contact and in mutual contagion, since they act in a related way. Situations of isolation, inertia or that do not imply in transformations of mediators and senses are not treated as communication. According to the hypothesis, on online social networks, the specificity of communicational actions lies in the digital traces (such as visualizations, reactions, comments and shares) of actants (algorithms, affordances, buttons, senses, materialities, companies and users). These traces are expressed by the metrics of the most nationally and internationally used networks Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter , but are not restricted to them, since they produce effects that dare to contents. Traces can be recovered faster and in greater quantity according to the resources and data available on the networks investigated. The difference between online and offline actions is the type of recovered trace and the possibility of recovering. The communicational sense of actions on online social networks refers to the observable link between actions and mediators, and not just to the interactions among users. These are sociotechnical networks because they entangle materialities, textualities, algorithms, affordances, users and meanings. Algorithm, content and user agency characterizes the online of the networks investigated, that do not preexist the actions of those networks. Communicational modes of action are described through screenshots on websites and network applications in order to evidence their affordances, which refer to the conditions of action offered by such environments. The conclusion points out that actions on online social networks are communicational when linking common mediations performed by several actants, who are in contact and provisionally linked to actions shared and distributed among the hybrids that constitute the analyzed networks. Communication shapes modes of action because it is one of the meanings of mediation, that is, it manifests itself in hybrid assemblages that associate the other meanings of mediation in a reticular and procedural way. Specifically, the communicational sense emphasizes the set of common actions and actants that break isolation, mutually bind and affect themselves and alter senses in network dynamics