A recepção das tecnologias de informação e comunicação entre os agricultores familiares de Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

This paper analyses the reception of the information and communication technologies - ICTs, among familiar farmers from Santa Maria , RS. This dissertation was structured into three chapters: ICTs and the Development - which tackles the internet growth, the advances in mobile telephony, the panorama of conventional telephony, the Brazilian politics about the information and communication technologies, the indicators of the information and communication technologies in Latin America, the information and communication technologies in rural community, and the research of reception; the second chapter The Methodological Aspects of the Research presents the characterization and location of the study; the target public and the description of the methodology. The research was realized into two stages: a quantitative one, where a questionnaire was applied to 157 familiar farmers from all the districts in Santa Maria ; and a qualitative one, that consists in three discussion groups on ICTs. The first stage sets the profile of the interviewees, identifies which are the information technologies available in the rural houses, shows the most used communication equipments, and discovers which are the channels of television and radio stations they prefer, the kind of use they make on cellular phones, and also the digital inclusion percentage among the familiar farmers; on the other hand, the quantitative research gets deeper in this results, registering the declarations that help to comprehend the relationship between the familiar farmers and the ICTs. The last chapter, Results and Discussion, shows the obtained data in the two stages of the research. The analysis is done based on the theoretic perspective by Jesús Martín-Barbero who detaches the influence of the mediations in the reception process. This study reveals the most used ICTs among familiar farmers in Santa Maria are radio, television and cellular phone. The digital exclusion is a problem: 90,45 per cent of the interviewees have never used a personnel computer. On the contrary, the cellular phone is more and more used: 88,53 per cent of the farmers declared that they have this equipment, but they use them for oral contact only, to talk to their families, to solve day-by-day problems or to obtain information to avoid big motilities. The other services as sending e-mails, access the internet and so on are in most part ignored by them. In the same way, the index also shows that the cellular phone has changed the way people communicate in rural communities, being the potential gate to the digital inclusion. Among the mediations which interferes in this process, we can identify the familiar behavior, the social time, the cultural knowledge and also the technological mediations.