Subjetividade e redes sociais na internet : as relações entre estudantes e professores no contemporâneo

Abstract

The following dissertation is composed after an investigation which aimed to follow the interaction, through social network sites, between a professor and her students at digital and graphic design graduation courses. This study discusses the production of subjectivity engendered by their interactions through blogs, facebook profiles and twitter accounts. While watching such interactions, I wonder: who are those professors and students forming and transforming themselves while interacting in social network sites? The method for this investigation is based on cartography, not a researching method composed by a series of tight stages and procedures, but a researching way that questions current cientific models, making possible to find a different way for approaching the “findings” in this study. This choice was made after I realized how cartography is open to new approaches to the research field and to all kinds of movements, deviations and diversity. In this dissertation, it is considered that subjectivity is produced by all human subjects and collectives, as well as technologies, institutions and discourses. Such subjectivities are never given or finished; they are always a process. Social network sites take a substantial role in the relation between professors and students, since this new possibility confronts us to different ways of being, produced apart from “classic” apparatus – school, work, company, family, etc. In situations observed during this research, I noticed that, when using social network sites, professors and students change the way they see time and space, the way they share information, and also the very notion of what it is to be a professor or a student. Time and space are enlarged, making possible a growth of social life between students and professors. I also could notice how blogs are used to “continue a conversation”, sharing references that may be related to what was discussed in the classroom, but also to other matters and interests. This way, people and technology tend to compose a hybrid network: a space where different knowledge, believes, desires and attitudes may associate freely. This space is not only an extension of the classroom, but a different possibility for learning and sharing, letting new ways of being professor and student to come.