Booktubers e convergência nos atos de leitura em comunidades virtuais de comunicação: análise de comentários de seguidores segundo o sistema de avaliatividade

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship established between books, readers, virtual communities of interaction and media convergence, aiming to contextualize dynamized communicative relations in the cyberspace and the changes witnessed by the introduction of the internet as part of contemporary reading habits. The research focuses on Booktubers actions in the cyberspace and analyzes how these actions influence the tastes and reading habits of Youtube community members. The term 'booktuber' refers to the 'Youtuber' that develops literary book reviews on its channel (video review). So that, we investigated Booktubers actions focusing on the analysis of texts / comments written by his followers, here called Follower Booktuber Commentator – FBC. After that, we categorized FBC lexical-semantic choices, within the Appraisal System - AS, proposed by Martin & White (2005), focusing on the semantic system of attitudes (attitudinal posture). So, we consider the semantic and grammatical manifestations for the following semantic groupings: affection, judgment and appreciation. The research methodology is of applied nature with a qualitative approach at an exploratory and descriptive level. The data were collected from the observation of channels broadcasted by Youtubers and by collecting postings from followers in the platforms of interaction. The analysis corpus consists of fifty-nine texts / comments from followers, taken from three review vídeos organized by the users of three previously selected channels. The general theoretical framework used to support the research is composed by Halliday (1994), Martin and White (2005), White (2004), Castells (2003, 2016), Wolton (2008), Jenkins (2009, 2014), Jenkins, Green, Ford (2014), Shirky (2011), Jeffman (2017), Arantes (2017), Balverdu (2014), Vian Jr (2009, 2010) , 2012), Vian Jr. and Vasconcelos (2017), Avelar and Azuaga (2003), Santos (2014), Caldeira (2016). The results of the analyzes indicate that the texts produced by the followers have a predominant occurrence of "affection" and "appreciation", and therefore, the lexicon used in the semantic field of "judgment" is less used. This indicates that in virtual interactions, followers tend to respect the opinions of other readers, avoiding evaluating them in the behavior field, thus, sticking themselves to the feelings and emotions field that they experimented by living their reading experiences. Therefore, it is clear that booktubers are promoters of the reading action inside and outside the cyberspace. The actions are constructed through YouTube channels, contributing to the sharing of literary experiences among participants of these virtual communities.