Educação ambiental no facebook: a propagabilidade dos memes sobre conservação da biodiversidade na página zoololgico

Abstract

The participatory culture and the collaborative content creation in social networks have turned memes into elements of communicative expression that are widespread today. This popular phenomenon that transits between the online and offline world has raised interest in testing the potential for science divulgation of this tool in consonance with the principles of Critical Environmental Education, which aimed the democratization in constructing and accessing to knowledge in the area of biodiversity conservation and the work of zoological institutions of the world. In this research, we tested the use of memes as a communication strategy for spreading socio-environmental content in Facebook, in a humorous but also dialogic and critical approach. Creating a Facebook page called ZOOLOLGICO, we sought to quantitatively and qualitatively characterize the public's acceptance of the proposal, using the insights of the page and an online questionnaire. The form was answered by 45 people (about 5% of the followers) at the end of 4 months of collection, to understand the nature of the relationships and interactions that have been formed between the followers of the page and the published content. The results show us that the the public accepted well the proposal, reaching almost 900 followers in just 123 days, and with publications reaching more than 50 thousand views. The public that answered the questionnaire was equilibratedly divided between the general public and people directly involved in the work of zoos, but the overwhelming majority were graduates or postgraduates (91.1%) in the area of Biological Sciences and Health (66.7%). The feedback received by the questionnaire was also very positive, with the overall content being classified as excellent (57.8%) or very good (35.6%), with a high consumption content of the content posted, and with several requests for the page to continue to function after data collection. The questionnaire also allowed us to raise some reasons that discourage the visit to zoos, specific notes about some of the posts and about four indicatives of conceptions’ changes about the importance of zoos’ conservation work and maintenance of the animals’ welfare in captivity.