Circulation systems, emotions, and presenteeism: three views on hate speech based on attacks on journalists in Brazil

Abstract

This text starts from the (sad) Brazilian case to reflect on how we got here as individuals, communicators and society and what are the characteristics of this contemporary cultural wound. For this, we will present three perspectives on hate speech to understand the phenomenon in an interdisciplinary way. The first will be the individual and biological sphere, on the neurological triggers of anger, the emotion that sustains hate speech, a theme so dear to the social sciences that it has caused the so-called emotional turn in the field. Next, the systemic issue of the hate circuit of narratives in communication environments will be presented, how they arise, how they propagate through networked information supports, how they feed back between intersecting contents. Finally, we will expand the debate to the issue of historical presentism, a phenomenon of postmodernity that makes heterogeneous discourse something threatening to homogenizing groups, without spaces for the historical nuances necessary for understanding complex themes, simplified by hate speech, which circulate in the speed of digital social networks. With this approach, we hope to better understand what are the motivators of hate speech, such as those reported at the beginning of this text, and perhaps understand how to stop this spiral of narrative violence that affects the society of (lack of) knowledge.