Discursos pedagógicos de marketing de conteúdo sobre algoritmos de plataforma: entre a adequação e a transformação

Abstract

The research investigated content marketing discourses about digital platform algorithms on the blog of a Brazilian digital marketing company, a place where discourses about algorithms interrelate and establish new forms of sociotechnical experiences. The study focused on epistemological dimensions: Cognitive, to analyze the specificities of algorithms; Social, to investigate the context of marketing in the 21st century; Discursive, to analyze the nature of the language in use in a native digital environment, focusing on the specificities of pedagogical discourse. This is considered in the research as a technodiscourse, a composite of technological and linguistic elements. The advent of the internet consolidated social relations mediated by technical objects in intense coding processes, accelerated production of large amounts of data and practices to make the various objects and social interactants interconnected. The codes themselves already have traces of opacity, which results in more difficulty in accessing understanding about how they function in society’s life. In this context, marketing companies dedicated to creating actions to share information about the nature and functioning of digital platform algorithms emerged. From this context arose the question: to what extent do content marketing discourses contribute to the deciphering of platform algorithms? The argument defending the thesis is that content marketing discourses occupy multiple discursive domains, reaching commercial and media spheres, mainly those more perceptible by society in general, and also reach the educational discursive domain, since these discursive practices constitute a cultural form that appropriates another originating discourse (scientific, commercial, technical, philosophical, religious and common sense), elaborating a new way of knowledge, commonly known as didactic knowledge, expressed in the form of pedagogical discourse. The epistemic-methodological basis that underpins the articulation of multireferentialized knowledge is hermeneutical, in which the object-field of social investigation is also a subject-field, with the research delineating a process of understanding and reflecting on a social situation that had already been interpreted, which characterizes the work as a reinterpretation of reality. To account for articulate multiple references of knowledge, the research was guided by theoretical contributions from Cultural Studies, Critical Discourse Studies, Philosophy of Technique and Sociology of Knowledge. The study showed that discursive production in content marketing approaches practices aimed at modulating and controlling behaviors in pedagogical mediations grounded in injunctive discursive constructions, of prescriptive tone, as well as such practice contributes to the formation of a conditioned writer/reader citizen to sociotechnically relate to a double interlocutor: a human entity and an algorithmic one. The algorithmic entity establishes a rationalized technical form of relationship and is the one who will decide how a publication will appear on the search engine results pages on the internet.