A Infância Convergente: um estudo crítico do Regime de Curadoria da Informação para o público infantil no YouTube

Abstract

Children born after the emergence of digital entertainment platforms are the first generation to have largely digital technologies mediated experience, which operate under the scope of surveillance capitalism. The wide use of ICTs by a relevant portion of the child population, from the earliest years, is combined with social transformations, specificities and childhood practices. Potentially, it impacts their reading of the world, thinking and sociability. This work contextualizes contemporary childhood experiences as a result of multiple sociohistorical determinations and relates the phenomenon of screens to the processes of capital accumulation. It proposes to examine YouTube's information curation regime, which influences what is produced, offered and watched by a large portion of the current children's audience, and to reach to what extent this curation is related to the children experience. The general objective of this study is to analyze, understand and discuss YouTube curation practices for children and, in this way, visualize the possible impacts of this form of mediation of information on the formation and exercise of autonomy and freedom of the human being. As for the methods, it is based on bibliographic and documentary research, of a qualitative nature and with an exploratory and interpretive purpose, starting from the perspective of interdisciplinary historical materialism, proposed by the information critical theory, for the composition of a critical diagnosis. It analyzes a set of 19 documents extracted from the YouTube portal, categorizing its policies and crossing the findings with the proposed theories. As a result, it presents critical readings of the platform's information curation regime, as an exercise of power, in the form of content, research and recommendations policies. It outlines the processes by which the contents are offered, from the guidelines for production to the attribution of relevance, by criteria aimed at achieving the company's commercial objectives. In the conclusions, it takes up the issues of autonomy and freedom and infers that the platform's policies can impact the exercise of autonomous thinking - since heteronomy and dispossession figure as foundations of service - and freedom - by interfering in the processes of formation self consciousness.