A CIÊNCIA MÉDICA E O UNIVERSO SEMÂNTICO DOS APLICATIVOS MÓVEIS: COMO OS JOGOS ELETRÔNICOS SIGNIFICAM O MÉDICO - UMA ANÁLISE DISCURSIVA DO APLICATIVO “TOUCH SURGERY” E “QUIZ DE MEDICINA”

Abstract

Advances in technology applied to health transform medical practice and the training of new professionals in the area. Here we highlight the games developed for mobile devices, used by these professionals. “Touch Surgery” and “Medicine Quiz” are the games that make up the corpus of the research reported here, which are, in this scope, taken as discourse. We analyzed how these games signify to the player part of the semantic universe of medicine, trying to understand how they attribute meaning to the medical professional, to medical knowledge and to medical practice. We mobilized the theory of Discourse Analysis, from which we established a device for reading the historical, social and ideological process that determines the production of these evidence of meaning, anchored in (ir)regularities in the functioning of language that the aforementioned application conforms. Through clippings of game phases, we understand the relationships of meaning that (de)stabilize certain images of how a doctor – his knowledge and practice – can or should be socially conceived. The analyzes point to the production of an effect of robotization of medical practice (the evidence that the practice and/or the surgical procedure are performed mechanically and methodically, through a pre-defined step-by-step and, therefore, and may constitute an object of training for any health professional). We show how this, and other effects are produced by the discursive functioning that the “Touch Surgery” and the “Quiz de Medicina” reproduce.