Comunicação pública e democracia digital: análise das estratégias comunicacionais dos portais de municípios gaúchos com mais de cem mil habitantes

Abstract

The theme of this research includes two main theoretical notions: public communication and digital democracy, delimited to the study of the digital public communication strategies in the government portals of the municipalities from RS State with a population exceeding one hundred thousand inhabitants. The issue of the research is structured around the following question: what are the strategies that the portals of municipalities of RS State, with a population exceeding one hundred thousand, contain and how are they established facing the theoretical assumptions of public communication and digital democracy in the mediatized context of society¿ The overall objective is the analysis of communicative strategies on the government portals of the municipalities from Rio Grande do Sul State, with a population exceeding one hundred thousand, under the theoretical assumptions of public communication and digital democracy and; the specific objectives are: a) identify the theoretical thought on the relationship between the topics: mediatization, internet, public communication and digital democracy; b) verify how (and if) the municipal governments of RS work the communicative potential of the internet for public communication; c) identify regulative evidences of digital democracy of each portal; d) analyze, tangentially, in the portals, the use of the public communication strategies for purposes related to the visibility of politic agents. The assumptions considered are: incorporating the mediatized logic, the portals are the stage to the politic visibility of mayors and other political actors of the administrative sphere, valuing the shape and the image over the relevant public content; the informative and unilateral emphasis is prevalent, accountable as Constitutional required and the other contents published are defined by the rulers, according to what they judge to be important for the citizens; the possibilities of bilateral flows of information between governments and civil society are scarce; the opinions, questions, and criticals are not published in the portals; and finally, the contents are not segmented and the access is difficult, ignoring the inequality of access to digital technologies. The methodological approach includes: definition of empirical corpus; literature review on the subject addressed; data collection and municipal portals in the classification of each portal ranks of digital democracy, according to the Silva s (2005b) spreadsheet. Finally, and comparing the data with the theories studied. The results point to the most elementary levels of digital democracy, whichever the informative emphasis, with few opportunities for discussion and debate about the topics of civil interest; and the portals are the stage to the politic visibility of mayors and other political actors and their accomplishments, to achieve recognition; furthermore, the results suggest that the communication portals needs to converge with the theoretical assumptions of public communication and digital democracy.