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

Children's Media Cultures in Comparative Perspective

“…Giddens (1991) argues that young people are, in globalised late modernity, fundamentally absorbed in 'the project of the self', a continual biographisation of identity for which today's complex, intertextual and reflexive media environment provides the symbolic resources for the nevercompleted task of drafting and redrafting. Acknowledging Buckingham's insistence on the recognition of structure, especially political economic and institutional constraints, as well as on the dynamics of the creative re-appropriations of given meanings, Wildermuth (2008) integrates audience reception analysis of interpretative practices with a notion of the mediated imagination in his rich, ethnographic account of youth's creative appropriation of media resources in Brazil in order to 'draft' and redraft the self. Again, this is a far from comfortable account for Brazilian youth suffer the contradictory demands of a 'periphery country', expected to 'progress' rapidly, especially via new media technologies, while still caught in the familiar trap of inequality, poverty and a considerable underclass.…”

Book review: Ruth Ayaß and Cornelia Gerhardt (eds), The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life

“…Media appropriation in everyday life, however, is not always so taken-for-granted, but more often constrained in different ways by recipients' repertoires (as Ayaß has realized as well; see p. 2) and their ideologies (Park and Wee, 2008). Attention, thus, should simultaneously be called to a contextualized understanding of the relationship between media texts and appropriation (Wildermuth, 2008). Another issue that might be of equal interest to readers is cultural appropriation of media texts that travel from one culture into other cultures in the globalization processes, which, however, is not addressed in this volume either.…”