The Mediation of letters from readers in the media: imaginary maps about Porto Alegre

Abstract

This article is a part of the research “Porto Alegre Imaginada: the citizen’s representations upon their city”. Here, the objective is to compreend how Porto Alegre citizen’s imaginary is built from crossing’s representations, about the city which circulates on the media, and from official data. Hence, it becomes possible to identify the differents dimensions on the urban imaginary’s built. It shows the Zero Hora reader’s representations over the city from their narratives. The analise’s corpus was settle with letters sent by Zero Hora’s readers as part of a competion promoted by TIM (Telecom Italia mobile), named A Minha Capital “My Capital”, to celebrate the 235 years of Porto Alegre, in 2007. The conclusion is that the print newspaper when publish the informative contents of narrative, shows images about Porto Alegre and its residents, permeated by symbols that have as a reference the inside imaginary about the city, based on the citizen’s relation that reinforce the bounds of belonging to the local culture identity.