Brumadinho dam collapse discursivized on Twitter: in the digital plots, the dispute of meanings.

Abstract

The dam in the Córrego do Feijão region, in the city of Brumadinho - MG, controlled by mining company Vale S.A., collapsed on January 25, 2019, which caused massive environmental and social damages. Due to the impacts caused, this fact had widespread repercussion in the digital media, which motivated us to conduct this research, whose general objective is to analyze the functioning of the discourses about the Brumadinho dam collapse in materialities made on social network Twitter. The study is based on the theoretical framework of Discourse Analysis developed by Pêcheux (1969, 1975, 1983) and his followers. Specifically, the main theoretical notions we mobilize are conditions of production, subject-position, interdiscourse and discursive memory, discursive metaphor, paraphrase, polysemy and silencing, those constitute our analytical categories. The corpus was composed of thirty-two discursive sequences (DS), constituted from posts (tweets, retweets) and comments, made on Twitter, as well as videos and images embedded in the posts about the fact. The results show that there is a dispute of/for meanings between accident/tragedy and crime, in which we observed an intense movement of meaning and subject, with the establishment of metaphorical effects in the discursive play. In addition, the analysis show that the implicit about the Mariana dam collapse are reinserted in the discourse about what happened in Brumadinho, and establish memory effects that both update previously said meanings, as well as produce movements in those meanings. Moreover, in this game of forces, there is a clash between the forgetfulness policies and the memory rescue policies (INDURSKY, 2015). In this plot, the discourse of journalistic media seeks to impose a direction of meanings, due to the opacity effect of the digital language. Furthermore, the social network Twitter has specificities that affect the production of meanings; its microblogging format brings into work the effects of immediacy, which swiftly puts in circulation a complex network of signifiers, subjects and meanings. Thus, Twitter facilitates ideological clashes and, in this plot, it constituted itself as a space for disputes of narratives and discourses about the Brumadinho dam collapse.