POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS FOR BEHAVIORAL DIVERSITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

To study the diversity found in social media interactions over politics, participant interactions on the blogs of journalists Luis Nassif (LN) and Ricardo Kotscho (RK) were analyzed, looking at the interactions between participants over their opinions about target political issues characterized as either diversity or uniformity. We analyzed a specific post and its comments related to PSDB and PT published at first in the blog of RK and then re-posted in the blog of LN. The comments were analyzed according to two main aspects: (1) positioning and form of interaction between the participants (classified as agreement/disagreement, and whether the participants presented their opinions with or without arguments); (2) positioning and form of interaction about PSDB/ PT (classified as favorable or unfavorable to these parties, and whether the arguments were presented with mentions of the party’s political program or disqualifying the party/ politician belonging to the party). With regards to (1), diversity in many aspects of interactions between participants was found in both blogs. Regarding the interactions about politics (2), uniformity was mainly found in LN’s blog: the majority of the participants positioned favorably to PT and unfavorably to PSDB. In RK’s blog, the relationship between favorable and unfavorable positioning to PSDB/ PT was more balanced. Possibilities and limits for diversity of interactions in social media are discussed, especially in interactions on topics traditionally classified as ideology or beliefs, as political party. Key words: media control, socially constructed knowledge, behavior analysis, interactions on blogs.