Cibercultura e as configurações da leitura na plataforma Wattpad: explorando as interações em torno do romance As Quatro Estações de Zoé

Abstract

This research is linked to the research line "Language and Social Practices" of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Education, Language, and Technologies (PPG- IELT) at the State University of Goiás (UEG). The research theme consists of investigating the configurations of reading in the context of information and communication technologies within the Wattpad platform. To do so, the research seeks to answer how reading practices are configured on the Wattpad self-publishing platform through the interactions of internet users around the novel "As quatro estações de Zoé" (Chassim, 2020). To answer this question, we are guided by the following general objective: to analyze reading practices on the Wattpad platform and how they interfere with the formation of the hyper-reader, based on internet users' interactions. With the popularization of the internet, readers have gained access to a wide variety of works and have interacted with authors and other readers. In this context, Wattpad stands out as a platform that allows for the quick and easy publication and sharing of stories, transforming the relationship between readers and writers. To develop this research, we rely on the theoretical framework of cyberculture, focusing on concepts related to literacy practices and reading in digital media (Santaella, 2013, 2021; Rojo, 2012; Lévy, 1996, 1999; Jenkins, 2006; Green and Ford, 2014; Cosson, 2008; Soares, 2002). Regarding methodology, this research is qualitative, exploratory, and netnographic, with the Wattpad platform as the locus and the novel "As quatro estações de Zoé" (Chassim, 2020) as the corpus. Regarding the analysis of internet users' interactions around the work, this research addresses the following categories of analysis: interactivity/interaction, multimodality, and identification. The results demonstrate that these categories are present both in digital text and in the relationships between reader-work-author. They highlight the profound transformations that have occurred in reading as a result of technological advances. It is hoped that this research can contribute to reflections on the configurations of reading in cyberspace, providing support to teachers and researchers so that they can broaden their perspective on this new possibility of reading and understand how this relationship between reader-work-author can interfere with the formation of the hyper-reader.