Redes de informação e sociabilidade de jovens da região do Seridó Potiguar

Abstract

In the last decades, we have witnessed significant changes in social relations, which were made possible due to the dissemination of the internet, and also to the creation and constant update of communication tools. In this “admirable connected world”, the way we understand the categories of space and time has changed, since there is a shrinking of space and an acceleration of time caused by the development of transport and communication technologies (CASTELLS, 2001; HARVEY, 2014). In this context, the development of information networks starts, thus, enabling the existence of a culture in virtual space – the cyberculture. Young people are the main actors in this process, for they contribute to the creation of the internet and to the birth of a virtual culture. Young people reinvent themselves from the possibilities that appear due to these social transformations, given that the new generations are socialized in a reality marked by the network’s space of flows. In this work, we aim to understand how young people from the Seridó region of Rio Grande do Norte deal with this reality, and how this reflects on their sociability. We start from the understanding that the access to technological goods is decisive for the access to virtual spaces in which the social relations among young people are developed. Our research took place in the Advanced Campus of Parelhas, which belongs to the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Rio Grande do Norte – IFRN, from January of 2017 until June of 2018. Initially, we applied a questionnaire to 76 young people who were students of the institute, and lived in six different cities within the Seridó region. From this data analysis, we created a script for interviewing ten young people. We aimed to understand the relations established through the networks by having access to technological goods. The research field was the school environment, which is a space that we consider to be a big knot in the sociability network of young people. We verified that: the access to technological goods is decisive for the social place of young people; the geographical space is not decisive regarding the establishment of its social relations, since they are mostly established in the virtual environment. Their projects for the future, as well as their perspective on society, are mostly established in the cyberculture environment, which is the place where they organize and look for references to create their own lifestyles.