O imaginário acerca do velho em um mundo que está envelhecendo: estereótipos da velhice no Portal UOL

Resumo (EN)

A great part of the world population is aging. Nowadays, one out of nine people in the world is 60 years old or more. By 2050, this proportion should reach one out of five people. This brings us social, economic and cultural implications as well as behavioral changes that can’t be ignored. The problem we’re now facing is that, despite the importance of aging in the modern society, in the media environment, especially on the internet, the space destined to the process is linked to a stereotyped vision that empties reality, this process being called "erasing old age." The present thesis has brought the hypothesis that the portal UOL is distancing us, including the old ones, from the Brazilian reality experienced by a great part of the elderly in this country. Initially, we started an exploratory bibliographical research, through authors such as Muniz Sodré, Edgar Morin, MalenaContrera, NorvalBaitello Júnior, Jean Baudrillard, in order to understand how the media constructs meanings, exerting power through an excess of visibility, but aiming to exhaust and erase the classic standards of representation, and then create new models serving a market logic which is based on standardization. For the research, ninety articles were selected and they are about elderly age, old, aging, all of them inserted in the portal UOL and its redirects between 2013 and 2015. The documentary examination took place with the analysis of the content of the messages and it shows how the media constructs meanings under the auspices of neophilia. Facing this construction that turns the old into a mere thing, we warn that the constant exchange between the self, the other and their representations, bring out the human porosity in relation to the environment, creating pressures on aging.