Ciberespaço e percepção das violências: uma investigação didática em geografia no município de Bossoroca/RS entre 2021 e 2023

Abstract

Cyberspace is a topic with few investigations in Brazil, especially in Geography, which should broaden its discussions in the face of the transformations of the society interconnected by networks. In the globalized world, capitalist society is increasingly inserted in cyberspace due to its social, economic, political, religious, cultural dynamics, etc. The internet has brought many benefits, such as quick access to information and knowledge, offering a new form of entertainment and relationships. However, in becoming an extension of society, cyberspace also has conflicts, violence and prejudice. School Geography must provide theoretical, methodological and axiological tools that allow students to interpret social relations in the space of virtuality and that provide conceptual, procedural and attitudinal bases that contribute to the formation of digital citizenship. This research defends the idea that Geography has potential possibilities to promote at school an emancipation of subjects facing violence in cyberspace, justified by competence 5 of the Common National Curricular Base (BNCC) and the digital and information literacy proposal of the National Digital Education Policy (PNED). The problem to be answered was: Do the students from Bossoroca/RS demonstrate digital citizenship and perceive the new forms of violence occurring in cyberspace? The general objective was: Investigate the perception of violence in cyberspace by Geography students in Basic Education and in Youth and Adult Education. The specific objectives was: (1) establish a theoretical-methodological link between Geography, cyberspace and the perception of violence, (2) investigate the perceptions of students from Bossoroca/RS with situations of digital violence based on surveys; (3) compare the perceptions of students from different spatial realities, gender and educational level; (4) reflect the role of Geography Teaching as a mediator of the emancipation of subjects in globalization. The methodology used was a qualitative approach, focused on the case study method, using the questionnaire technique to collect data in educational research converted into a pedagogical-educational intervention, interpreted in the concepts of perception and social representations in Geography. As a result, Bossoroca students had difficulty recognizing the prejudices expressed in memes on social networks, with perception changing depending on the particular reality of each student and each school. We conclude the importance of School Geography in the formation of citizens in informational globalization, whose teacher must assume their commitment to critically emancipate children and adolescents in the face of new forms of social relations and violence. We also conclude that Academic Geography has an urgent duty to appropriate cyberspace as a potential geographic space, dualized by the “real-virtual” and “material-immaterial” dichotomies, but as concrete as traditional geographic space, recognized as the fundamental basis of this science. Therefore, we need to follow the advances of Humanity in the transformation of the world, whose internet, social networks and digital platforms represent a virtualization of the categories of analysis, demanding a scientific realignment that we propose to define as “Geography 4.0”.