Transformations of the journalism event in social networks: from the mobilizations against homophobia to the crisis of a country music duo

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a research that investigates the creation of events through social networking sites on the Internet. There is already a specific type of event that serves the logic of these networks, especially those whose production and distribution take place based on online platforms and digital tools. This paper investigates two cases: the first concerns the duo of Brazilian country music singers, Zezé di Camargo and Luciano, who, after an argument that occurred in a concert in the city of Curitiba, announced the end of the partnership. The video was posted on YouTube and was immediately spread through the social networks, which generated intense conversation about the episode until it became a journalistic event in the traditional media. This paper also examines the organization of a protest against the attack on a homoaffective couple in a street of São Paulo in 2011, completely worked on by Facebook. Based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of semiosis, a map of the construction of these events is drawn with its various ramifications, from the articulations within the network to the production of meanings that they develop. The events studied have as an element in common the leading role that social networks had in their constitution. They possess the nature of the network and are framed in what is understood now as cyberevents, a category that poses new challenges to the practice of journalism.