A metrópole comunicacional que emerge dos aplicativos para dispositivos móveis : #um estudo em comunicação e design

Abstract

This dissertation has as its starting point the concept of Comunicational Metropolis proposed by Massimo Canevacci, establishing a connection with the research of Lev Manovich, which explains an increasing influence of software in our society. Thus, taking these two pillars as a foundation, this research aims to understand the concept of a communicational metropolis that is emerging from the use of applications for mobile communication devices (smartphones). Mobile media has become a key part of this work since they provide mobility to the user who moves around physical spaces, promoting greater interaction with the local context and causing new communication and social dynamics. Data referenced within this thesis indicate that in a short period of time, almost all mobile handsets will be smartphones and will reconfigure once and for all the existing social practices. However, the metropolis observed in this study overcomes the communicational framework proposed, since it is also a creative, projectual, audiovisual and softwarized environment. In this context, a set of mobile applications exploring urban issues arise as a contemporary tool. In different ways, this tool dialogues with the multiple metropolis, from the design practices that daily occur in it, to the cultural transformations generated by this tool. In order to answer the research questions and to identify the changes that happened, Walter Benjamin’s character flâneur was used as a methodological resource that gave rise to the construction and analysis of 15 fragments extracted from a digital communicational metropolis observed through popular apps and its images. The intersection of these fragments highlighted peculiarities and dynamics that updated the understanding of a Communicational Metropolis, structuring it as a combination of its streets, avenues and dynamics caused by the apps. A combination of selfies and urban landscapes; check-ins and earned benefits; the established ‘smarphonization’ and the lack of predominant WiFi signal; getting lost and not ever getting lost; digital culture and media processes; models, habits and experiences; creativity and design; voices, media and messages; shares and devices; that is, a composition of mobile applications themselves and the communicational metropolis which they interact with.