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If you are looking for a text that clarifies and explains the connections between various theories of popular culture, hegemony, resistance, and audience appropriation, then look no further. Jesus Martin - Barbero weaves together the ideas of theorists such as de Certeau, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Williams, Benjamin, Hoggart, Thompson, Bakhtin, Eco, Baudrillard, Foucault, and Habermas. The common thread that he draws from these theorists is a rediscovery of people's roles in producing meaning and creating their own identities through localized cultural processes that operate in spite of, or in resistance to, attempts at cultural domination through communication media. At the heart of this text is the author's passionate belief in people as active, intelligent, and tactical beings who are fully capable of disrupting, subverting, resisting, and appropriating media processes and messages.
Martin - Barbero sees communication as a process of mediations and he examines the "'other' side, namely reception ... the resistances and varied ways people appropriate media content according to manner and use" (p. 2). This approach is not new to North American communication scholars, but what is new here is a thoroughly Latin American perspective that unveils a refreshing and stimulating panorama of vibrant mediation processes. The media in Latin America are exceptionally dynamic and complex. Television and radio have saturated daily life. Even in remote rural areas people erect makeshift television antennas on thatched rooftops, and power television...