Literacia midiática: a compreensão crítica e a produção criativa no universo ficcional de Euphoria

Abstract

This research aims to investigate how the characteristics of complex TV stimulate the critical understanding and creative production of interacting viewers. Which stylistic, narrative elements, and transmedia actions mobilize the audience's critical skills, and how they resonate, expand, and creatively reinterpret the plot in social TV. Complex TV, a concept coined by Mittell (2012; 2015), engenders new narrative, stylistic, and engagement contexts. Narrative enjoyment, temporal displacement, three-dimensional characters, and the use of metalinguistic and irony require the audience's careful reading to understand these fictional universes. By reinforcing social bonds and redefining shared experiences, social TV enables various appropriations and amplifications of the watercooler, contributing to the sustainability of contemporary fictional narratives. Comments posted on Twitter synchronously with the programming grid form momentary communities guided by the social network's informational architecture, bringing together various interacting viewers. In this sense, media literacy materializes through two axes: production, based on studies of complex TV, reflecting on active reading and cognitive processes, and consumption, in social TV studies, focused on network conversation and the production of multimodal content in the backchannel. To achieve the objective, we adopted the fictional universe and the backchannel of the second season of Euphoria (HBO, 2019 – present) as a sample. The investigation was guided by two main articulations. Initially, we analyzed television style (BUTLER, 2002; 2010), cognitive theories of narrative comprehension (MITTELL, 2015), and transmedia strategies (JENKINS et al. 2014; SCOLARI, 2016; SIGILIANO, 2017), discussing aspects of the story that stimulate the audience's careful and critical analysis. The second articulation focuses on the impressions of interacting viewers in the backchannel. Based on the coding of conversational contexts, we discussed the narrative developments of the series commented on, expanded, and reinterpreted on Twitter. Finally, we developed reading keys related to the fictional universe and the backchannel to analyze how Euphoria stimulates the development of media literacy and how these skills operate in the network conversation of interacting viewers. We conclude that throughout the episodes, some rules of the fictional universe are altered, providing new interpretive layers. It is up to the interacting viewer to understand the recurrence, how it integrates the meaning-making of the plot, and finally identify and interpret its variations. Informational gaps, in addition to integrating the second season, take various forms, such as in imagery composition, temporal displacement, and narrative multiplicity. In the backchannel, based on the characteristics of Twitter's informational architecture, the audience develops a kind of narrative guide on the timeline, analyzing the resources of complex TV, completing, and expanding points of the story that were intentionally omitted. The application of the theoretical-methodological proposal highlights the continuous process of building media repertoire about the characteristics of Euphoria and, subsequently, the insertion of these elements into new structures, activating various cognitive processes of the audience in understanding the plot.