Isolamento social e modos de subjetivação em sites de redes sociais: o funcionamento do discurso de celebridades em tempos de pandemia

Abstract

With the COVID-19 contagion spreading across the world at an alarming rate, several measures needed to be taken. These are knowledge and powers that are imposed in a hyperconnected society that change the entire way of living in a time of crisis, which has awakened new ways of subjectivation of the celebrity subject on social networking sites. In this thesis, we dedicate ourselves to studying this discursive functioning, in which we propose to analyze the discourse of the celebrity subject that circulated on social media sites during the COVID-19 social isolation, understanding the knowledge-power relations and the modes of subjectivation/objectification of the subject in web surveillance. This research was developed in the field of Applied Linguistics and is situated in the area of French Discourse Analysis, based on arqueogenealogia of Michel Foucault through notions such as discourse, statement, knowledge, power, surveillance, regimes of truth, subjectivity and governmentality. About the internet we base ourselves on studies of Castells (2015), Jenkins (2009), on information regime with Han (2022), on surveillance with Bruno (2013) and about celebrity subject with Rojek (2008). In this study, we problematize the constitution of the celebrity subject on social media sites during the pandemic. To do this, we took as corpus twenty-seven reports published on different internet news portals and twelve Instagram posts by celebrity subjects. This is a descriptive-interpretative research with a qualitative approach. Thus, through our analyses, we realized that the celebrity subject is constituted in the virtual through regimes of truth of a time in quarantine, thus, he/she is subjectivized when performing certain activities with a focus on prevention against COVID-19 and exposing this in virtual surveillance. He is a person who confesses particularities of his quarantine on social media sites, and, through this, he governs himself and others. On the other hand, by resisting and not following the rules of the pandemic, the subject goes through a severe punitive process that in the virtual world is presented through the culture of cancellation. In this way, we understand that knowledge-power relations acted in the virtual world through divisive practices, excluding the subject who presents some problematic attitude, while at the same time including subjects who are in agreement with normality in times of pandemic.