Ambiências digitais como lugares de visibilidade/invisibilidade das organizações na gestão das crises / Digital environments as places of visibility/invisibility for organizations in crisis management
Authors:   Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Scroferneker Cleusa Maria Andrade , Silva Diego ,   Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Ramirez De Amorim Lidiane ,   Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, de Oliveira Rosângela Florczak ,   Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing
Published: June 2021

The digital environments (re) defines the relationships in/of organizational spaces. We realize that in these spaces as associations they move between visibility and invisibility strategy, considering opportunities and risks that involve them recursively. In this scenario, we discuss possible places/non-places for organizational communication in digital environments and reflect on the crisis management process in associations and the respective 'place' of communication. We start from the assumption that the associations are immersed in a scenario of uncertainty (Morin, 2008) and hypervisibility in which the ordinary daily life becomes, increasingly, transparent and absent of borders for the social environment. With this, the critical hypothesis, which are conventionally called ‘crisis’, become the new common (Bauman, 2016). And it is precisely in times of crisis that communication gains centrality, because “without effective, transparent, timely communication, it becomes much more difficult to control the crisis” (Forni, 2013: 289). We resort to complex thinking (Morin, 2008) and, in empirical terms, to the observation of two crisis that occurred in Brazil involving a mining company, Vale S.A. (Brumadinho and Mariana). To reflect on the (non) place of communication in crisis situations, in the light of the analysis of the cases mentioned, we are anchored in the anthropological conception of place and not place proposed by Augé (2010, 2012). The results indicate that there is a (de/re) territorialization in/of communication in these environments, over the course of events, potentiating non-places (Augé, 2017) and the absence of dialogues. There is a potential for hierarchical communication to give rise to dialogical dialogue (Sennett, 2012), which is not always understood, comfortable and experienced by organizations. Such scenarios, fluid and accelerated, demand openness to horizontal and more egalitarian communication to the detriment of hierarchical, vertical, centralized and centralizing communication. As Santaella (2010) points out, digital environments, such as social media, greatly increase the collective relationships that underlie organizations, propose agency and hybridization, fluid territorialities and 'temporary upheavals', displacement marches through differences, “to communicate other visions and ideas that exclusive ideologies and absolute truths, closed in on themselves like walled cities, do not contain” (Santaella, 2010: 280). On the other hand, that same fascination and seduction in the face of the possibilities arising from this mediatized reality, sometimes overshadow movements of invisibility, silencing and emptying of relationships and interactions. Vale S.A.'s cases also show the dilution of borders and communicational territories, in the midst of mediatized contexts, which cause the unfolding of crises to overflow the geographic locations where critical events take place. If the digital age has ubiquity as one of its features, in which borders between private and public life, between inside and outside, between here and there (Santaella, 2010), we believe that the effects of crisis also become 'ubiquitous', that is, they are everywhere and completely reconfigure the notions of impact and reach. In this context, attempts to make aspects of the crisis invisible become insufficient. The qualitative and exploratory dimensions (Gil, 2021) characterize the nature of the work. The theoretical review was developed from the dialogue between authors such as Augé (2017), Bauman (2016), Morin (2015), Forni (2013) and Wolton (2010), among others.