Comentários sobre apostas esportivas online em redes sociais: um estudo sobre a coerência das interações e a dinamicidade do significado

Abstract

Sports betting is a recent phenomenon in Brazil. The official regulation allowing online bookmakers to operate was only established in 2024. In this study, we examine interactions about sports betting found in comments on the social media Instagram, considering that the internet constitutes a productive environment for investigating naturally occurring interaction (Meredith, 2019). Based on this premise, the aim of the study is to investigate how interactions on this specific social media display coherence, as well as how sports betting is conceptualized within this context. The theoretical framework of this dissertation comprises three major approaches: Digital Conversation Analysis, Social Semiotics, and Sociocognitive Pragmatics. Digital Conversation Analysis (Meredith, Giles and Stokoe, 2021; Jucker, 2021; König, 2021) is relevant to the present investigation as it enables the analysis of how members of the betting community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) organize their interactions and achieve coherence based on the affordances of the platform (Meredith, 2017), as well as how they adapt elements of face-to-face talk-in-interaction to asynchronous written interactions (Giles et al., 2015; Meredith, 2019). Social Semiotics (Djonov and Van Leeuwen, 2018) is employed to examine the multimodal elements that constitute interactions on Instagram, a social network that is inherently visual in nature (Poulsen and Kvale, 2018). Sociocognitive Pragmatics (Kecskes, 2021) is drawn upon under the assumption that meanings in interaction are co-constructed in a situated manner by participants, considering that speakers rely both on pre-existing common ground (Kecskes, 2021) and on common ground that emerges from interactional and cognitive factors. These cognitive factors are associated with the different conceptualizations (Croft and Cruse, 2004) instantiated in language. Regarding methodology, the first ten comments and their respective replies from five different posts published by a humor-oriented profile focused on sports betting were collected. Initially, comments were organized in tabular format following the screenshot transcription conventions proposed by Bezemer and Mavers (2011). In a second stage, the collected data were analyzed based on the aforementioned theoretical framework. The findings indicate that participants adapt elements of interaction according to the platform’s affordances, perform social actions such as alignment and affiliation (Stivers, 2008) in various ways, and conceptualize aspects of sports betting through metaphors, metonymies (Croft and Cruse, 2004), and conceptual blends (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).