Interações no ciberespaço como estratégia de construção do conhecimento: o caso das PANC - Plantas Alimentícias Não Convencionais no Facebook (Brasil)

Abstract

In recent years, social media has gained a unique place in people's lives. Social media like Facebook are widely used by people and organizations for a variety of communicative purposes. This study analyzes a Facebook group dedicated to the PANC - Unconventional Food Plants theme, in order to answer the following question: What are the characteristics of social interactions of Brazilians seeking information about PANC on Facebook? The aim of this study is to explore communicative patterns, strategies and knowledge construction on a still new theme in the national context, seeking to understand how collective intelligence is used to build knowledge about PANC. To achieve the objective of this research, a netnography was performed by collecting and analyzing postings (publications) of content in the PANC group, created in May 2013 and which has more than 129 thousand participants (on May 21, 2019) . During one year, from April 2018 to April 2019, non-participant observations and data collection were conducted between January and March 2019, so we developed a content analysis to categorize the posts. The main use of the group by participants includes the identification of PANC, through the use of collective intelligence, generated by the social capital available in the group. The content posted was subdivided into eight thematic categories, the main ones being “PANC Identification” (40.0%) followed by the “PANC Presentation / Dissemination” category (16.4%). However, “PANC News” (4.0%) is the category that generates the most engagement among group participants, verified by the number of likes, posts and shares, which represent 30.73% of interactions calculated by the weighted average. The results show that the evaluated group mobilizes social capital in the PANC theme, through strategies of dissemination and sharing of knowledge, contributes to the construction of collective knowledge on a topic still little addressed in traditional media (television channels and newspapers).