Comunidades de prática digitais e sustentabilidade da aquicultura na Amazônia brasileira. O caso da rede social on-line WhatsApp “Peixe de Rondônia”

This article highlights a network of aquaculture farmers in the central-eastern region of the Brazilian Amazon based on the discussions of the WhatsApp group “Peixe de Rondônia”, between August/2016 and October/2017, about solutions to overcome environmental, social, and economic challenges. To this end, we sought to verify the usefulness of this network for sharing information to promote the sustainability of the sector. Using social network analysis techniques and content analysis in an exploratory perspective, with computational support from Gephi and Iramuteq software, the results show that the total network has four classes with different and complementary levels of interaction and low density (0.038). The content analysis demonstrated the existence of five clusters of interest: “market”, “social group”, “production processes”, “legislation” and “standardization”. The “market” cluster is robust in terms of proximity and cohesion, forming a community of active practice for terminating producers. The other classes are related to social components of the network and focus on institutional aspects: topics such as commercial, productive processes, and legal security are discussed. Concerns about economic and ecological sustainability were noted, but it was found that the network is not effectively constituted as a community of practice, as there is no evidence that the discussions promoted in the group, so far, have generated real actions to contribute to the sustainability of the activity. The evidence indicates that the group actors, individually, have an interest in the implementation of the proposed actions, however, it was found that there is still a need for awareness and collective organization to achieve common goals focused on the sustainability of the sector.