A sociabilidade programada do Instagram e sua pedagogia

Abstract

The present work addresses the technocultural ways in which Instagram establishes the users' socialization process and the characteristics of the teaching-learning process implicit in this platform, assuming the position that a technology is never neutral, but a mediating and productive force of new forms of sociability. The work investigates the formative intentionality of Instagram as a socialization space for the production and sharing of content and focuses specifically on the role played by the technology of the Instagram platform in the socialization of users and the way in which it plays this role. We consider the general guidelines of the ascending analysis of power coined by Foucault (2014) and the methodological model for platform analysis by Van Dijck (2013) as a methodological contribution that guides the research. The research poses the following questions: what political and pedagogical values guide the programmed socialization of Instagram? What ways of relating to others and to yourself does Instagram aim to develop and engage its users? And by what means? The investigation is divided into five parts. In the first part, we discuss the current social and technological context of datafication that has absorbed and transformed the process of digitizing information and social relations promoted by digital culture from the second half of the 20th century onwards. In the second part, we “dismantle” Instagram's technology into three layers that follow the path taken by the data from its collection sources to its transformation into economic capital, investigating how Instagram organizes itself as a permanent system for converting personal data into capital data. In the third part, based on the results obtained in the first stage of investigation, we “reassembled” the platform through its protocols to characterize the programmed sociability of Instagram and the pedagogical values and principles that guide the socialization of users. The objective is to understand how Instagram contributes to the production of meaning and action of the subjects, identifying which ways of relating to others and to itself Instagram aims to develop in its users. In the fourth part of the paper, we move on to position the platform by examining its similarities to a number of elements of neoliberal strategy and technology. The fifth and last part of the work investigates in detail the means by which Instagram promotes such values and modes of subjectivation, means that are intimately related to the logic of entrepreneurial pedagogy and can be summarized in three main areas: the identification of the user account with the user himself through a process of involvement in the construction of a personal image, called datafication of the self; the use of gamification strategies with continuous rankings and awards; and the provision of reports with performance metrics in order to encourage self-assessment and individual accountability. The research revealed that what happens and is reproduced daily on the platform among its users has an active and preponderant participation of the platform itself through the way in which it is planned to function and, above all, the sociability that it is programmed to constitute.