Comunicação digital e formação crítica: a construção do sujeito contracultural na era do ciberespaço

Abstract

The research focuses on the formation of the individual in cyberculture, understanding it as the contemporary phase of the advanced media civilization. The aim of this study is to investigate whether non- formal environments mediated by digital technologies contribute to the construction of a countercultural subject, a process conceived as the result of everyday life experiences less influenced by technicist and economic values, which are so characteristic of the contemporary civilization. The communicational and trans-political (i.e. beyond established politics) nature of this era - added to increasingly diffuse and less institutionalized socializing processes - indicates that the formation of individuals should be analyzed taking into consideration different practices and contexts than those proposed by formal education. The research was developed based on the activities of the Transparência Hacker and the Ônibus Hacker, collectives that advocate the use of technology and its devices as drivers of political and social actions. The working hypotheses are the following: (1) the collectives, as well as a clear space for socializing, are also places of formation, and (2) even though the activities are mediated by new digital technologies, they potentialize the construction of subjects who are more alert to the contradictions of their time. Together with the notion of cyberculture, three other theoretical bases gave support to the study: the perspective of modernity, theories of socialization and theories of the sociology of education; all intersected by the category of criticism, an important methodological procedure to prepare the questioning needed to confront the corpus and the investigated social-historical process. The analysis of texts and activities of the collectives, as well as interviews and participant observation allow coming to the conclusion that non-formal educational practices - when guided by values and procedures that are different than those influenced by market and media discourses - may form a potential environment for critical formation. The countercultural response, however, is compromised and tangentially set due to the fact that the involved agents have an inescapable bond with the current communication power