Constrained Appropriations: Practices of Media Consumption and Imagination amongst Brazilian Teens

 

A discussion of the contingent character of young Brazilian's media culture is the focus of my contribution's theoretical approach. Thus, while giving recognition to young people's active agency in the creation of media-centred lifestyles and youth cultures, I will seek to demonstrate their practices of meaning making and consumption are realised ‘under conditions which are not of their own choosing', but constrained by the wider relations of economic and political power which shape their lives. Based, primarily, on the results of my qualitative empirical field research in Recife, I will show how access to specific media and the varied uses young people make of, especially, television, are ‘structured', though far from completely determined, by the socio-economic, gendered , race and cultural divisions, which characterize Brazilian society.

                      To exemplify the outlined disparities, the practices of mediated imaginations evoked by the results of my interview-based study, are one prism through which I will seek to specify the phenomenological dimension of differences in media consumption and appropriation. Observable disparities in the local ‘inflection' of global media, that is disparities in the capacity of young Brazilian's to reconfigure and integrate the meanings of ‘external' cultural forms and media texts and to integrate them within local culture and their own identities, is another concrete dimension. However, more than merely describing and typifying some of the distinctive cultures of media consumption which unify and divide Brazil's (urban) youth, attention is also given to an  understanding of the relationship between young people and media, as developed in concrete attempts to increase the cultural competences of young, ‘disprivileged' media consumers. The contribution addresses thus issues of media literacy and empowerment.