Reading and the other cultural consumption process: interview with Néstor García Canclini

Abstract

In this interview, the Argentinian philosopher Néstor García Canclini, who lives in Mexico since 1976, presents his sight on the current context of reading consumption, especially since the perspectives of digital culture. His most recent studies include research on young people, urban cultures and digital networks, and the perspectives of anthropology of readers. Dedicated to topics such as globalization, national identities, hybrid cultures and cultural consumption studies, he is an author of great influence in Latin American research, especially in those that approach the intersections between communication, culture and society. In the 1990s, García Canclini began to delineate an interdisciplinary sociocultural theory of consumption, which abandoned the idea of consumption as a place of purely irrational decisions. Their contributions bring together different lines of interpretation and indicate possible points of convergence to understand the processes of communication and reception of symbolic goods.