Jornalismo como antifilosofia e a formação de indivíduos potencialmente fascistas na sociedade excitada: um estudo dos comentários sobre o golpe de 2016 em Veja e Carta Capital

Abstract

The consolidation of online social networks has led to a constant state of excitement and optimism among web users, industry professionals (such as journalists), and also in the academic field, where theories that predict the transformation of our own way of life into a “cybersociety” self-regulated by the “collective intelligence” have emerged. However, against the exacerbated euphoria, what has been seen in this space is still a wide domain of the semi-formative processes propagated by the culture industry; the exponential multiplication of shallow contents that supersaturate our senses; and the proliferation of hate and intolerance speeches, typical of those personalities that Theodor W. Adorno and his collaborators at Berkeley identified as potentially authoritarian or fascist. Starting from the described reality, in a dialectic movement of negative criticism, this thesis aimed to answer how (and to what extent) the supersaturation of the senses of individuals associated with the semi-formation promoted by the mass media contributes to the proliferation of fascist syndrome traits in the social networks. For this, it was hypothesized that: i) hegemonic journalism, as a product of the culture industry, builds the citizen's memory with arguments that interest to the dominant group, constituting itself as a kind of antiphilosophy; ii) online social networks, beyond democratic expectations, serve as an extension to the discursive domains of mass media; and iii) the exponential multiplication of shallow content amplifies semi-formative processes, aggravating the supersaturation of the senses and conditioning the formation of authoritarian personalities. In order to validate the proposed hypotheses, the Critical Theory was used as a theoretical basis and also as a method, especially from the intersection of the debates / concepts present in the works Dialectic of Enlightenment: philosophical fragments, by Adorno and Max Horkheimer; Excited Society: philosophy of sensation, by Christoph Türcke; and The Authoritarian Personality, by Adorno and his Berkeley group contributors. In order to fulfill the necessary objectives for the thesis confirmation, this research was developed from four main theoretical movements, namely: characterization of journalism as an antiphilosophy; updating and defending the vigor of the concept of cultural industry to analyze the current situation from the debates about the excited society; resumption of research categories developed by the Berkeley group; and empirical analysis of the proliferation of potentially authoritarian discourses among web users. In this last stage it was carried out a hermeneutic investigation of 1,633 comments published by netizens in the fanpages of the magazines Carta Capital and Veja on Facebook. The study was conducted from the nine categories extracted from the F-Scale. As “background” for data collection was chosen August 31st, 2016, the date that marked the consolidation of the coup against President Dilma Rousseff. As it demanded a certain tolerance for participation in the democratic game, the choice for this “agenda” also suggested a potential presence of undemocratic thoughts, which eventually occurred during the studies of the collected material. In the analysis of the comments on the Veja fanpage, it was possible to highlight the manifestation of speeches that show personalities aligned with an obsession with sex and sexuality; with drive for uncritical submission to figures considered as strong (authoritarian); and who seek mythic explanations (superstition and stereotypy) to justify their acts and weaknesses. In the case of the comments in Carta Capital, the attempts to appropriate the discursive space by individuals aligned with a political position contrary to the publication were highlighted, being recognized in them traits of personalities that, according to F-Scale, could be described as authoritarian aggressiveness and unwillingness to debate (anti-subjectivity). Thus, from the previous theoretical discussion and the identification of these manifestations of potentially authoritarian personalities already on the discursive surface, it was verified the validity of the presented thesis: the supersaturation of the senses conditioned by mass media in online social networks is able to accentuate the processes that, in the last instance, may culminate in the [semi]formation of effectively fascist individuals, conditioning the manifestation and/or consolidation of personalities who already retained this tendency in the deeper aspects of their structure.