O Empoderamento virtual do consumidor como mecanismo de atuação cívica on-line indutor de novos padrões ao segmento empresarial

Abstract

With the technological advances provided by globalization and digital immersion, cyberspace has become the main infrastructure for commercial transactions, economic management, advertising, and communication between individuals, with this, a new actor came to appear in postmodern society: the consumer 4.0. Unlike a mere buyer and a reflection of the broad capitalist changes in the culture of consumption, the market scenario that, most of the time, prioritizes for-profit and the distancing of the State from the fundamental rights of consumers, this digital subject started to bear becoming increasingly connected between online and offline, being one step away from accessing information, thus requiring a more responsible supplier with a good market image. In this sense, this dissertation aimed to analyze the strengthening of digital solidarity among consumers through acts of boycotts and public manifestations, individual or collective, emitted in online social media to be perceived as an alternative mechanism to the exercise of citizenship independent of the performance governmental. The methodology was based on an interdisciplinary theoretical-bibliographic and documentary framework, predominantly by the deductive method, using qualitative research and an empirical component of an elucidative character, whether the analysis of cases occurred during the period from 2018 to 2020 in the environment of main online social media - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter - to invalidate the conclusions of the theoretical research. The study was divided into three sections. The first approached about the culture of consumption and the false promises of post-modernity from the perspective of market capitalism and its complications in the identity and subjectivity of the consumer. The second part focused on the perspective of the state scenario and the distancing of government policies towards the citizen-consumer, considering the obstacles in the three spheres of power - Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary -, the crisis of the individual and collective judicial model and the accentuated consumer vulnerability. In the last section, the discussion about the technological and informative immersion of the consumer and supplier between the online and offline environments, the meaning of brands in the digital consumer society, social media, and the acts of dissatisfaction, deepened mainly through the acts of boycott or “virtual cancellation” perceived in the economic, ecological, religious, minority, labor boycott or social, relational, experiential and/or political modalities, discussing, finally, about the exercise of digital citizenship through of these consumer manifestations and their obstacles. Thus, through the subsidies collected, it became possible to perceive that, behaviorally, the consumer has behaved in a more selective and identitary way about the decision-making factors of purchase in addition to the price of the merchandise, to value the experiences and share them in the fluid and interactive environment of social media, emphasizing their civic virtues of self-regulation, awareness of their power and freedom of choice, causing sensible changes in this new space of economic interaction, importing, not infrequently, in the loss of assets of the supplier and the need to readjust or reaffirm more responsible behavior given the greater likelihood of having a negative image associated with your brand, due to social punishments perpetrated by consumers and potential consumers.