The Act of Liking: The standardization of responsiveness on Facebook

Abstract This article analyzes posts published by pages of Brazilian popular science on Facebook, based on the concept of responsiveness from the Bakhtinian theory. Due to the fact that social networking sites provide standardized and quantifiable means of responsive forms, part of the consequences produced by this type of online interactivity is investigated. Qualitative and quantitative data of the analyzed corpus are combined to produce an interpretation about the act of liking on Facebook. All publications were collected during four months of publication by the pages of Pesquisa FAPESP, Scientific American Brasil and Superinteressante. As a result, it is possible to identify discursive and thematic characteristics of the posts that obtained the greatest repercussion among the readers, as well as to establish relations between the hypertextual reading, web 2.0 and the responsive forms produced in this context.