O design multimodal do Instagram: da barra de rolagem infinita à organicidade algoritmizada do feed de notícias

Abstract

In this article, I problematize the multimodal design of the most popular social media in Brazil, Instagram. I bring multimodality as a theoretical contribution (KRESS, 2000; Van LEEUWEN, 2011), multiliteracies (GNL, 2021; KALANTZIS, COPE and PINHEIRO, 2020), digital literacy (HISSA, 2021a) and some text categories, such as progression, continuity, sequencing, non-contradiction (KOCH and ELIAS, 2016) and informativeness. I analyze twenty posts taken from the information feed of a personal Instagram account from the logic of capturing attention (WOLF, 2019; CESARINO, 2022) through the digital resource infinite scroll bar. This design corresponds to a multisemiotic attention-grabbing model that controls, based on an algorithmic system, the flow of information, aiming at maximizing the user's time spent on the platform and, as a consequence, the uninterrupted extraction of data from all users through the algorithmic hyper-curation of digital content feeds. The result shows that social media have become e-commerce (40% of posts came from commercial pages) and that design has become a merchant of attention in the non-sequential dialectical game, whose thematic progression in leaps sometimes distracts us, sometimes distracts us. envelops. The scrollbar design appears in the Instagram analysis as the main multimodal organizer of discursive-argumentative relationships, allowing to articulate logical-semantic and situational relationships, reordering time-space, navigation, action, use, interaction and interactivity in the same virtual application. This experience, as a communicative event, has consequences for our language, for our cognition and, certainly, for our society.