Communications

Television (TV) has always been the focus of continuous debate around its shifting social practices, involving and challenging all established main agents, from content producers to brands, corporations, regulators and audiences (Boddy, 2002; Uricchio, 2002). At the same time, the remediations of TV are at the core of broader discussions on media change, particularly since the popularization of media consumption through the Internet. TV retains a position of centrality for understanding what it means to live in a connected environment. This article contributes to this debate through the analysis of the co-viewing practices within the specific context of Brazil’s most popular cultural product, the telenovela. After an overview of the key themes and scope of the research, we will situate the practices of co-viewing in the context of some of the key issues regarding connected viewing. We will deal with the particularities of the Brazilian telenovela as a cultural product and finally we will outline our empirical research on co-viewing practices in unofficial Facebook groups surrounding the controversial prime time telenovela ‘Babilônia’.

This paper seeks to discuss the notion of transparency as related to the Facebook News Feed filtering algorithm. It analyzes the social practices of subjects that made intensive use of the platform for entertainment ends (they use Facebook to follow content related to telenovelas — the most-watched type of TV show in Brazil). These specific users’ practices were examined in relation to the materiality and the sociotechnical nature of algorithms. Thus emphasis is placed on the users’ context, their local enactment through specific and intensive usage. A selected group of subjects from Brazil was interviewed to examine how their practices on Facebook are intertwined with the way they receive information through the News Feed. It is possible to observe some practices and a material arrangement nexus that are connected to the way that respondents visualize information: a preference for using the smartphone application, an embedded usage that is combined with other activities online and offline during the whole day, a distrust in the sources of information posted on Facebook, a partial awareness of a filtering process of the News Feed Algorithm (most of the time it is called just Facebook by the interviewees), and finally, a set of complaints about the News Feed, together with attempts developed by some of the respondents to try to trick it. Drawing on the analysis developed, this article develops the notion of the double-edged transparency of the News Feed Algorithm: On the one hand, the users can see through the News Feed without noticing its material presence, enabling them to have a more harmonic flux of information with their peers. On the other hand, transparency represents a mediated effect of the mobilization of opaque entities which hides the developers’ politics and ideologies.

de plataformas y tecnologías digitales en nuestras prácticas creativas
cotidianas”, nos hemos propuesto abordar, desde diferentes perspectivas, el
papel fundamental que juegan las narrativas digitales y la generación de datos
producidos por personas comunes, o lo que se ha venido a denominar
como ‘usuarios’.
Antes de nada, debemos tener en consideración que este mismo término,
‘usuario’, es en sí mismo problemático y evidencia algunas contradicciones:
en primer lugar, denota de manera tecnicista la figura del consumidor
que hace uso de servicios (Primo, 2003), así como el individualismo instrumental
asociado al uso de los dispositivos tecnológicos (Livingstone, 2008),
los ordenadores, las tabletas y los teléfonos móviles. Asimismo, evidencia la
relación de poder que se establece: existe un proveedor, propietario de una
plataforma que se encuentra en constante evolución con el objetivo aparente
de mejorar los servicios que se utilizan, eso sí, a cambio de obtener los datos
personales y de consumo de los usuarios para su uso comercial (van Dijck,
2013). De todas maneras y, aunque sea de forma crítica, el término usuario
se ha consolidado como clave dentro de la academia y de la industria,
porque de alguna manera ilustra cómo los nuevos dispositivos y medios de
comunicación se han convertido en una parte importante de nuestra rutina
diaria, convirtiéndose en materialidades tecnológicas que integran nuestras
prácticas sociales en una sociedad cada vez más conectada.

Resumo: Falamos com John Postill, professor de Comunicação na RMIT University (Melbourne, Austrália), sobre tópicos do seu novo livro: " The Rise of Nerd Politics ". Postill explica o que é a política nerd, como as práticas criativas da cultura do remix e da cultura livre emergem e se expandem para os movimentos sociais através de imaginários populares. A entrevista termina com um tópico muito atual que em inglês é chamado de " data storytelling " , as histórias que estão por trás de dados massivos e que, quando se tornam histórias, trazem questões técnicas para outros públicos, para pessoas comuns. Palavras-chave: tecnopolítica, política nerd, cultura livre, narrativas de dados, data storytelling, remix.

Neste dossiê, “Narrativas dos usuários: os usos de plataformas e tecnologias digitais em nossas práticas cotidianas criativas”, nos propusemos abordar, a partir de diferentes perspectivas, o papel fundamental desempenhado pelas narrativas digitais e a geração de dados produzidos por pessoas comuns, ou o que são denominados ‘usuários’.