| João Luis de Araujo Maia: | |
| Name: | João Luis de Araujo Maia |
| Academic Institution: | Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro |
| email: | jmaia@msm.com.br |
| Country: | Brasil |
| Paper Title | Communication and Culture: Symbolic Values in the Community of Mangueira |
| Abstract: | Communitarian and popular culture can be understood today through being resistant to any homogenization process originated from mass culture. The life style that is established in communitarian associations become more fragmented in its interactions when one recognizes that multiple values will built, through communication, the representations of both the city and, more specifically, the community. We work with the concept of “quotidian”, having the Cultural History of Rio De Janeiro as an analitical framework. Among those quick circulating and instantaneously consuming objects of technological contemporary mass culture some elements are selected and will suffer a process of cultural “re-interpretation” and “re-signification” to be, subsequently, slowly savoured and elaborated in peculiar communitarian space. In this relational process, new social actors appear and play key-roles in the process of elaborating the city´s image. Those men who live in community acquire symbolic strength in traducing the local representation power puzzles. We will study the use of the computer in a LanHouse of the community, as an instrument that colaborates in the construction of popular culture and promotes values of social and cultural aggregation in “Mangueira”. The speedy technological culture does not reduce the force of the culture that is established in the community:on the contrary, it fortifies the symbolic elements that are constructed there. |