Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

How do complex selves translate into “users”? What aspects of behavior, personality, and identity are considered relevant for certain digital platforms, ambiances, and performances? This research aims to understand how different digital platforms can translate selves into users and their autonomy (permissions and possibilities), experiences (which paths and narratives they construct when immersed, direct attention, perceive, act, and interact) and profiles (purposes that drive dynamic data collection and their respective projection upon users’ current and future behaviors, as well as compiling rules and strategies of presentation, translation, inhabitation, and habituation inside the platform). Based on Pragmaticism’s multidisciplinary background, it draws a semiotic model of the generation of virtual ambiances and performances in two mobile worldwide easy-to-access APPs, with focus on the theory of the interpretants. APPs will be qualitatively monitored and compared observing: management/advertising models, legislation, user interfaces, and data collected. Designing the human presence in digital platforms depends on decisions made by the development team and based on their values and purposes. Partially or fully ignoring certain human perspectives, behaviors, and identities can result in digital misrepresentation and exclusion of minority groups. The demands include, for example, the right to free speech, establishing social connections, data privacy and security, education, healthcare, and work. It is expected that the first version of the model contributes to build and spread digital literacy and accessibility through the dialogue between developers and final interactors.