Reflexions on television and “lack of culture” in Brazil

Abstract

This article approaches the meaning of television in contemporary society, based on an ethnographic audience research carried out with people belonging to middle class families in a medium-sized city, in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The people who were questioned in that research see TV from a socially critical point of view, which supposes that other groups do not have culture enough in order to watch it in a critical way. The connections among the suppositions of the participants, as well as a certain intellectual debate, are important in order to try to identify the reasons for this critical outlook to remain so strong, even in a context of cultural diversity and cultural plurality. Both perspectives, taken from the studies of reception and the people researched are brought together in this article, seeking to point out that there are some shared assumptions about the superiority of the literate culture, even when one considers the receiver as the subject in the communication process. Eventually, the article outlines some consequences of the current debate and hypotheses for new researches.