Estudos sobre divulgação científica e redes sociais virtuais: o caso do Boletim Behaviorista

Abstract

The investigation of the use of virtual social networks by institutions, groups and individuals, for the dissemination of information, is important since a large part of the population uses the Internet as the main source of information, and this, in turn, can have impacts on how people interact with each other. Faced with the need to understand this practice, were conducted to identify three studies, characterized as quasi-experiments to identify and analyze one of the practice publishing reviews on the Behaviorist Bulletin blog by the Culture, Language and Symbolic Behavior (CLICS), based on the concept of control agencies and evaluation of the effects of the dissemination of reviews via the CLICS Facebook page, on access to reviews. The number of accesses to the reviews posted on the blog were collected in two moments, before and after the publication of the review via Facebook, in addition to the data from the Facebook post being collected. The results indicated that there was an increase in the number of hits as reviews after being posted on the Facebook page. With this, both the blog and the CLICS Facebook page can be analizyzed as control agencies, since, because they are the information holders, they may be able to influence the behavior of others, when producing and disseminating information. Finally, it is considered that the data found in the studies were important to meet the proposed objectives and to confirm the hypothesis raised that there were effects on the data of views on the blog, after the manipulations made on Facebook. In addition, it is also considered that the concept of metacontingencies can help to understand the information dissemination practice analyzed here.