Ciberdemocracia e movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra: práticas comunicacionais no terreno da esfera pública virtual

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the analysis of the communication strategies organized by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in its official website (www.mst.org.br). The insertion of this social movement in what is known as the virtual public sphere and the actions of this collective in the context of Cyber Democracy were observed. The objective was to understand how the virtual public sphere can be seen as an interesting space, capable of venting a multiplicity of voices that, often, do not find suitable conditions to express themselves in the off-line public sphere, but that, many times, through acting in the cyberspace, reach what is called overflowing : an intersection between two spaces (on and off) that point to practical results for the agent. Thus this paper was conjugated from the observation of three elements that organize it: the constituting of a virtual public sphere, Cyber Democracy as the new terrain that enables citizenship actions and the strategies organized by MST in order to act in this scenario. The principles of the Comprehensive Sociology guided the theoretical construction of this research; and the principles of Ethnography and Netnography, the empirical construction. Through these methodological options we have tried to identify the gains obtained by this collective from its actions in the virtual sphere and answer the following question: what does it represents for MST the organization of a website in which it can say about itself, directly to the receptor, without any intermediates?