Leitura e autoragem discente na cibercultura: netnografia dos fóruns do AVA no programa “To Graduado” de uma Universidade tocantinense

Abstract

Contemporary changes in the relationship to knowledge in cyberculture have shifted the centrality of knowledge from stable content to a regime of circulation, updating, and permanent recomposition, moving beyond static knowledge toward flow-knowledge. In this horizon, as Lévy (1999) observes, knowledge is not confined to institutional repositories; rather, it is produced in networks, through collaborative dynamics and a continuous movement of rewriting and redistribution. It is within this context that this doctoral research is situated, with the aim of understanding how the reader and student authorship-making are constituted in cyberspace, based on a netnography of the distance-learning (DL) program in Technology in Public Management at the State University of Tocantins (UNITINS), within the scope of the “TO Graduado” Program. The investigation focuses on analyzing profiles of student authorship according to modes of reading that emerge in the ecosystem of digital education, mobilizing the theoretical categories of Santaella (2004), Lemos (2024), Barthes (2004a; 2004b), and Foucault (1996), in dialogue with Carvalho and Pimentel (2020), particularly regarding the use of the term autoragem as an update of the creative process characteristic of cyberculture. The study starts from the following research question: how are students’ reading and autoragem— understood as interaction, co-creation, and the sharing of knowledge—constructed in the university’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), considering a cybercultural milieu marked by remixing, reterritorializations, and the algorithmization of discursive production? Methodologically, the research adopts netnography, based on Kozinets (2014) and Hine (2000), to analyze interactions, profiles, and productions in the VLE, organizing the data according to types of readers—contemplative, moving, immersive, ubiquitous, and hybrid— and adding the figure of the generative reader, understanding autoragem as an effect of relations among signs, subjects, and algorithmic interfaces. On the empirical plane, the thesis shows that students’ experience in the VLE is not distributed homogeneously: the access time of 58 students from the Palmas/TO learning center (year 2024) has an approximate average of 2h51m, with a maximum of 11h31m and a minimum of 14 seconds, producing a heterogeneity that prevents “linear” readings of engagement and reinforces the need to interpret participation as an ecology of presence rather than as a simple isolated metric. From a conversational standpoint, approximately 45% of posts display explicit reply markers (“Re:”), but the thesis demonstrates that replying does not necessarily equate to dialoguing: the raw data indicate a relevant conversational layer, yet require interpretive operationalization to distinguish task compliance from threads that resume, transform, and negotiate meanings. In the same movement, topic duration (with a median around three weeks and a long tail) serves as a clue for observing circulation and return—that is, practices and gestures—avoiding the reduction of “types of readers” to stable psychological profiles. Thus, in discussing reader, authorship, and autoragem in distance education, the thesis argues for moving beyond the passive receiving student toward a student who is simultaneously reader and author, active in building self- learning, whose profile is linked to autonomy, agency, collaboration, creativity, curiosity, digital competence, and reflexivity, within a milieu in which cyberteaching and mediation devices modulate the conditions for the emergence (or rarefaction) of autoragem.