Researcher uses sociolinguistics tools to investigate the daily life of the category
With a degree in Social Sciences, Literature and Linguistics and a master's degree in the latter, researcher Julia Frascarelli Lucca used her diverse knowledge to analyze the figure of the São Paulo motorcycle courier from the perspective of identity studies and sociolinguistic theory, in a doctoral thesis defended at the end of August at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at Unicamp.
In the research “The Modern Diary of a Motoboy from São Paulo: Identity Construction and Stylistic Resources”, Julia seeks to understand the relationships between society, language, identity and style. But why the motorcycle courier as an object of study? “The work category, I believe, is structuring of society”, she explains. “I lived in São Paulo and noticed that the issue of traffic is very constitutive of the city. In this context, the motorcycle courier was a recent urban actor, growing and with completely precarious working conditions. Therefore, since 2009 I chose it as an object of research”.
The formalization of the category's work also occurred in 2009 – until then, it was a completely informal activity and is still mostly carried out by men from the most popular classes and with a low level of education. The choice of the city of São Paulo for the research, explains Julia, was due to the city's protagonism as the country's financial center, epicenter of the circulation of people, services and consumer goods. “This is the apex of capitalism and the motorcycle courier is a product of this need for speed, urgency in deliveries, the immediate, the everything has to happen now. For me, it wasn’t enough to just study the motorcycle courier’s speech itself – I wanted to understand him as a subject permeated by all these issues of capitalism, to analyze linguistic use and its social context”.
Furthermore, the São Paulo motorcycle courier as an object of study allowed the researcher to perform a linguistic analysis of a very characteristic figure from the capital of São Paulo: “The São Paulo motorcycle courier has a whole association with mano speech, this popular urban speech from São Paulo. The construction of linguistic style is associated with very local issues, with very characteristic slang, including bro, okay?, mine”.
Invisible observation, analysis that makes visible
During her master's degree, Julia did field work visiting motorcycle courier agencies and motorcycle pockets in regions such as Avenida Paulista. She conducted interviews, a traditional tool for studying sociolinguistics, with professionals in the category. Although she recognizes the importance of fieldwork for the study, the researcher states that at one point she noticed that the strategy of talking to the motorcycle couriers was insufficient for her objective of thinking about the issue of identity through their speech. Julia is a woman, not a motorcyclist and is a researcher.
Although very receptive, the motorcycle couriers know that she does not belong to their group. In the interviews, she realized that they were constantly monitoring her speech and trying to distance herself from the negative stereotype of the “bro” motorcycle courier, like the one represented by the character “Jackson Five”, the most famous creation of comedian Marco Luque. “Of course they will monitor their speech – they know all the negative images that exist against them and they know that I come from this society that judges them.”
Monitoring the speech of those being researched became her biggest challenge, and, to overcome it, the researcher sought, in her doctoral research, ways to analyze the group's speech in contexts in which they felt more comfortable verbalizing. With this objective, she adopted an innovative methodology that is still little used in sociolinguistic research: the analysis of YouTube Vlogs.
The channel Motoka Dog, with more than 135 thousand subscribers on the video playback platform, almost a thousand videos and 17 million views, was chosen for analysis. The channel's proposal is to make a reality show about the daily life of a motorcycle courier, with an emphasis on the professional performance of its protagonist, a motorcycle courier who is very representative of the category. On his own channel, he defines himself as “your YouTube motorcycle courier”. Videos of him, many recorded on top of the motorcycle at high speed crossing São Paulo while the vlogger talks to his viewers, allowed Julia to analyze the speech of a typical São Paulo motorcycle courier while he is mainly addressing his peers – the target audience for the videos and comments is almost entirely made up of other motorcycle couriers – therefore having less monitoring of their speech than in traditional sociolinguistic interviews.
Julia analyzed nine videos posted on the platform since its creation, in 2014, to understand how the São Paulo motorcycle courier's identity is constructed through language. “Identity is always being constructed and this is a space where he develops this identity”, she argues.
Discover the Motoka Cachorro channel!
“In the fieldwork I did, on Avenida Paulista, the motorcycle couriers commented that they really liked these channels about motorcycles”, he says, also highlighting that the fieldwork carried out during his master's and doctorate studies – going up to the motorcycle couriers and talking to them – was essential to discover the YouTube channel and use it as an instrument to carry out a kind of digital ethnography of the group, observing the speech of a typical representative of the group, expressed spontaneously.
Furthermore, this virtual space expands and reinforces the sociability of motorcycle couriers, strengthens exchanges between them, helps them organize themselves and even articulate demands. Julia cites the video comment forum as an important space for exchanging opinions and debates about traffic projects and laws. “The motorcycle courier is not like a teacher or worker, who at school or at a factory can get together and have lunch with their colleagues. It does not have a meeting point for the category, a physical and concrete space for sociability like other professions have”. Interaction between users also allows a space for affirmation, construction and continuous reconstruction of the group's identity.
In Anthropology, the use of digital ethnography has become increasingly common, but in sociolinguistics it is still a little used resource. The researcher's plural education allowed her to combine resources from these different areas to successfully apply this innovative methodology in her research and build a corpus of unprecedented analysis. More than allowing you to observe the object of study without generating direct interference or even being noticed, the use of the tool, argues Julia, also allows you to expand the research objects beyond the researcher's sociocultural limits. “In sociolinguistics, it is very common for the object of study to be, for example, the analysis of the speech of university students and the middle class – there are few studies that analyze the speech of the most popular classes, the working class”.
Julia's research and the channel Motoka Dog they allow us to see up close and analyze the reality of this professional category, an object of study that is still uncommon at universities. For the study author, this was the best part of doing the research. “There is a lot of discussion about the precariousness of work at universities, but these voices are still not very present here. For me, the best part was being able to bring this other voice that is normally silenced, marginalized and has little space in academia,” she explains.
