Consumption, "Tourism-Merchandise" and Actor-Network Theory: The Cartography of Controversies and the Case of Telegraph Rock Trail – RJ | Chapter 10 | Advances in Applied Science and Technology Vol. 2

The contemporaneity is marked, in part, by the Control Society, characterised, among other aspects, by consumption. In this scene, both the material and the immaterial objects come to have value in the market, so that one of the influential tools in this period is the use of sociotechnical networks, also involving the social behaviours of individuals and their desires of belonging. In this perspective, the research aims at analysing the use of the images inherent to the landscape of the Telegraph Rock Trail - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - transmitted in these networks, as an influencing factor in the increase of the number of visitors in this place, having as background to the control society. The study attentive to Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which measures the fact that the "human actor" and "non-human" can transform the society. Thus, Facebook posts were analysed from the Cartography of Controversies, which is the operationalisation of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). For that, the contents of the publications from the years 2015 to 2017 were analysed, in the page called "Pedra do Telégrafo_RJ", with 41 thousand participants. Clues point out that the use of socio-technical networks, in the scope of consumption may have influenced the process of production of the trail, through its transformation into a product that now has market value, through the logic "tourism-commodity". It is also identified that the market exhibits the image of nature in a produced and in agreement with the precepts of the control society, outlined by Deleuze. In this logic, natural attributes dissociate themselves from the roles of components of human subsistence and associate with components of the existence of a fluid and schizophrenic in their actions. Thus, while defending nature through their rhetoric, promote actions that can jeopardize its integrity, by the decision to know the place and go along said trail, aspects. However, this study is not competed to leverage new research with the respective theme.

Author(s) Details

Barbara Lucia Guimarães Alves