Deliberação nos comentários dos leitores de jornais online: caso da secção de Educação do Público.pt

Abstract

Based on the potential of interactive communication and decentralized Internet, the increased accessibility of spaces for readers to post comments in the online press has sparked debate about its contribution to counter the tendency, as shown by the modern society, in the exercise of an active citizenship. Given this phenomenon, this article aims at analyzing and discussing evidences of this possibility in comments published in the Education section of the online newspaper Publico.pt , taking as a reference the deliberative theory. Sustained in techniques of content analysis to a corpus of 294 comments, regarding 9 news from the Education section, the results suggest that although the commentators do not intend to build consensus around their comments, or to agree with the comments of others, they are interested in expressing and sharing their opinions, arguments and points of view, even if they do it anonymously. The analysis of the published comments concluded that deliberation we found in this online space played a public and collective role, since commentators really discuss common problems in the public sphere, although it doesn’t make the required transformation in the participants’ opinion.