Por uma perspectiva relacional da comunicação: um olhar sobre o nexo indivíduo-telenovela

Abstract

This research has as its starting point the following finding: the studies aimed at understanding the communicative-media processes are marked, from its origins, for communication models that conceive the media and the individual as instances in opposition. Comparatively, the most significant variation detected between these studies is in the way they compose the place of dominance in the media communication, occupied sometimes by the media (structure), sometimes by the individual (agency). Because we believe this dichotomous perspective about the nexus media-individual fails to achieve the relations established between the communicating subjects, precisely because conceives communication as a fragmented system, composed of independent elements (issuer-receiver) whose connections – summarized superficial interactions – are established a posteriori, we are proposing, as an alternative paradigm, a relational perspective of the communication, which we developed from the elisian thought about the social configurations and the dispositionalist and contextualist theories of the action. Aiming to demonstrate some of the explanatory potential of this relational perspective, we developed a pilot study about the communicative process established between producers and receivers of the soap opera Fina Estampa. On the whole, this study sought to evidence the determinants of the production and reception of this soap opera and then compare them to show their relations. Through data collected using documentary survey, non-participant observation and interviews, we could verify that the worldviews which guide the communicative behaviors of the producers and receivers of the Fina Estampa were grounded in logics of perception, thought and feeling that these subjects incorporated through their experiences on the most different spaces of socialization. After that, when we compare the results obtained in the analyzes of production with those obtained in the analyzes of reception, verified that the more close structurally were social experiences of the communicating subjects, the greater were the agreements between them, and the more distant, the more intense the disagreements, being the levels of influence between them also directly related to these proximities and social distances. Hence, we could demonstrate, at the end of our study, that the hidden relations between producers and receivers of the soap opera Fina Estampa were founded on shared social structures. Or, to use the elisians terms, these relations were based in the structural connections between social networks of interdependence in which those communicating subjects were inserted.