Jornalismo e a duração dos processos civilizadores: análise da adequação comportamental e da formação de uma segunda natureza em Monte Alegre - PR (1942-1964)

Abstract

The civilizing processes theory was developed by Norbert Elias, a sociologist who published his initial formulations in 1939. From a long-term perspective (approximately 700 years), the author studied the changes and social processes that contributed to the European customs transformations, from Middle Age to the Renaissance, which allowed him to observe that, in an interdependent way, the socially acceptable standards of conduct change over time in accordance to the changes in social structures. In the period analyzed by Elias, the process of learning and synthesis – mediated by the knowledge and available resources – was less accelerated than the present day. The author, in the book Escritos e Ensaios I, stated that these processes developed more slowly, once humans knew very little about the world around them, but it accelerated as inanimate nature became known. In this perspective, the thesis discusses the social acceleration and the potential reduction of the temporal scale for the civilizing processes observation after the Industrial Revolution, as well as the adoption of short and medium duration for the study of behavioral adequacy processes and the second nature formation, respectively. Seeking to attest to such hypotheses, the company town of Monte Alegre (current municipality of Telêmaco Borba – PR) was taken as an empirical paradigm. The studies performed based on journalistic sources have demonstrated, besides socio psychogenetic aspects of the figuration investigated, that the newspapers are a potential element acceleration of the civilizing processes, given their influence on the social fund of knowledge construction and the normative pressure exerted by the narratives of pedagogical character for the constitution of “civilized” human beings. The papers presented in the thesis, which has a multipaper format, constitute an effort to appropriate the concepts developed by Elias, seeking to advance in relation to the original postulates. The research results indicate journalism as an element that accelerates civilizing processes, through the periodic publication of successive syntheses that allow learning of socially acceptable behaviors to occur with greater agility. At the same time, it attests to the feasibility and pertinence of studies on civilizing processes at different durations than those originally used by Elias.