Divulgação científica na internet: criatividade e (re)produção didática no trabalho de ‘criadores de conteúdo online’ de física para Youtube e Tiktok

Abstract

Among forms and formats, scientific dissemination has its importance both in the educational field and in the political field; this is because it appears as a movement that aims to democratize science by bringing scientific knowledge to the non-specialized public. The history of scientific dissemination confirms that different media have already been (and have been) used with the aim of disseminating science to the population. Currently, new media formats for scientific dissemination have emerged, as an example we can mention podcasts and channels on different digital platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok. This movement complements the history of scientific dissemination and surpasses other dynamics already established in this regard by incorporating them. Regardless of the temporal scale, science communication has always had a very clear purpose: to share scientific knowledge in a popular language. However, this popularization of the language should not happen anyway, precisely because scientific dissemination is a political act and a production of humanity. Especially in current times when the flow of information is enormous – some information can keep us from knowing reality. With the advent of entertainment networks, the activity of scientific dissemination became decentralized, so that there was a change in the pole of message transmission. Today, anyone can talk about science on the internet, so what, on the surface, is extremely positive, is actually quite dangerous, mainly because the internet is a terrain dominated by the big companies of Silicon Valley. Located in the United States of America, these large companies, through regulations, influence the activity of Scientific Dissemination so that it starts to have forms and contents that meet the requirements of these platforms, that is, forms of approach and specific contents that " engage” on social media and streaming. Seeking to analyze this autonomous movement of creators of science communication content for the internet, in the field of Physics, we investigated the creative process of five online content creators of Physics. In this sense, we seek to know how the dynamics of the scientific dissemination movement on the internet has been going beyond what it appears, knowing, above all, its contradictions. Such investigation, therefore, has its bases in Historical-Dialectic Materialism and permeates the analysis of videos produced and the analysis of the interview with each content creator. In this analysis, we look at the phenomenon of scientific dissemination in terms of form (how it is disseminated) and content (what is disseminated). Data analysis allowed us to identify that the production processes of scientific dissemination content on the internet have pointed to a hegemonic trend of Scientific Dissemination based on entertainment, which we named Scientific Dissemination of Entertainment, a dangerous project that, in its appearance, it is playful, pleasurable, interesting and informative; however, at its core, it is a movement that aligns with the neoliberal interests of data capitalism, whose main interest is in the commercialization of internet data. This movement, within the scope of works on the Scientific Dissemination of Physics, sometimes tends to elevate Physics as entertainment, or tends to elevate (pseudo)science as entertainment, thus having repercussions on two striking trends of Scientific Dissemination on the internet, the which are discussed in detail in this paper. So to speak, we found that the Scientific Dissemination of Entertainment is a consequence of the dynamics of the internet, its functioning serves the interests of capitalism, making online content creators of Physics (re)produce didactics and emblems that can harm the education project non-specialized scientific public.