Comunicação e divulgação científicas: das distinções conceituais às aproximações promovidas pelas redes sociais digitais

Abstract

Science dissemination practices are gradually perceiving the digital social networks as environments that favor them. Based on this assumption, this research raises a basic discussion that allows the reader/researcher to understand the importance of popularizing scientific knowledge through social networks and to trust, justifiably, in the content conveyed in these environments. This is a bibliographical and documentary research of a qualitative nature, which, based on a literature review, inferences and interpretations, brings together elements that support this quality of social networks. It infers that social networks symbolize a new dimension of the democratization of science, governed by digital technologies, where discussions between scientists and the wide popularization of scientific content can be practiced, simultaneously, in the same space. It concludes that the increasing presence of scientists, practices and products of science in digital social networks, which materialize mainly through technical-scientific and professional events, and the increase of personal and institutional profiles dedicated to science, offer subsidies that, to a certain extent, attest to the quality and value of the scientific content left there, as well as its relevance in the process of massification of science.