Natural Beauty, Virtual Community and Actors
Name: ROBERTA CALDAS SIMÕES
Publication date: 26/04/2010
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| TERESA CRISTINA JANES CARNEIRO | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: Virtual communities or on-line communities, as is known, are increasingly present in our daily society. They promote and facilitate the reinvention of many social practices have institutionalized such as relate and communicate, educate, consuming, among others. These communities bring people together in online environments imbued with values and common interests among its members. Because to a relatively new configuration, it is conjectured that the interactions resulting from computer mediated communication have cultural and social features that provide the academic study and managerial issues such as consumer behavior, marketing research, and the identification values and meanings in specific consumer segments. Given these issues, this study will use virtual communities related to the beauty of hair as a source of research to understand how it is possible to identify and characterize styles of consumption in online communities on Orkut. As such, this research was conducted in a virtual community whose issues revolve around a salon that specializes in curly hair, the community Beleza Natural ES. For methodological reasons it was adopted in our study netnography qualitative approach, proposed by Robert V. Kozinets, and for the analysis of collected data, elements of the computermediated discourse analysis (CMDA), postulated by Herring. The results show that the participants use Orkut as a space for expression and expansion of a social network in the Internet, and in this environment that the main communicative flows are linked to products of the Instituto Beleza Natural and consumer relations in the environment off-line. In addition to clarifying what are the valued and devalued in relation to the beauty of curly hair; what are the beauty rituals; and what effects are expected with the treatment received by that body part.
