Cultural Consumption and Media Power

Abstract

All symbolic production is the inevitable result of a process of exchange and translation that is culturally mediated by the entire social system. In other words, the media are an institution that is historically and socially determined by the cultural system. And, for the same reason, their signifying practice cannot be understood without taking into consideration the political economy that conditions and governs the forms of informational representation. Consequently, analysing the media presupposes an attempt to understand the social change, and the technological, cultural and economic-political transformations that

affect ways of representing, of the building of one’s own truth and memory, desire and its pregnancies, the projections and expectations that human beings place within the spectrum of symbolic and cultural practices in relation to the self-understanding they come to about their own existence as individuals, but also in terms of their belonging and inclusion in the communities with which they identify themselves and in which they are recognized.

(Brea, 2007)