Rurbanity and Mediatization: A case study of TV consumption on an Argentine agro-town

Abstract

This text connects the hegemonic urbanization and mediatization processes to demonstrate how television consumption, an experience in contemporary life, also permeates, in a particular way, a specific Latin-American territory made up of the interpenetration of urban and rural features.

If in the modern 21^st-century city one of the main practices consists on watching and being watched, it is worth identifying the ubiquitous cases of TV consumption inside and outside home in the various urban agglomerations, and particularly the agro-town of the Argentine Pampas, as a basic experience in the peripheral advanced modernity.

Cities are thoroughly approached from the sociocultural theory, but a one-dimensional approach from multiple perspectives prevails: the core of the industrial development and the capitalist concentration, a text resulting from the rapid exchange of messages, that social space different from the rural space, a particular enclave displayed along the historical time, an alternative fictional discourse capable of mobilizing social desires, and a narrative tension between a real city and a absent city.

Advanced modernity includes simultaneous globalization, urbanization, individualization, and mediatization processes, among other dynamics. Due to mediatization, the core processes of sociocultural activities such as politics, religion and education, are, as a result, influenced by and dependent from the media. The importance of television and other devices refers to their presence within society as a semi-autonomous institution and, at the same time, integrated within other social institutions. Thus, urban residents live as in a television condition.

As a consequence, a socio-communicational analysis should be conducted of the towns in the Argentine Pampas Region and of the media consumption of the urban population, which does not recreate a one-dimensional and dichotomous tendency of the social theory. That is, given the historical characteristic of the predominance of agriculture in the inland of the Argentine Pampas, now globalized under the agro-business model, it is appropriate to assume a perspective on the possibilities of hybridizations or mixtures on the display of certain urban systems that are always constructed dynamically with reference to a multi-dimensional context.

The rediscussion of the concept of “agro-town”, generally limited to the acknowledgement of urban territories with a predominance of agro-industrial activity, seems relevant in order to analyze, from a relational and historical perspective, several towns in that region made up of five central provinces in Argentina. At the same time, it is worth identifying the specificity of the mediatized cultural consumptions of these particular territories that are, in some sense, “rurban” territories, i.e. urban and rural spaces at the same time.

A study with these objectives includes three operations integrated into a methodological convergence or triangulation strategy: a) the discussion of the history, relevance and significance of the “agro-town” notion within the frame of the sociocultural theory in order to understand its implications on the studies about the relationships among communication, media, and urban territories; b) the analysis of the quantitative secondary data on TV consumption in the residences of a particular urban configuration, such as Río Cuarto town (Córdoba, Argentina); and c) an ethnographic exploration of other places within this medium-sized urban area that describes certain ways of exposure to television also given on a daily basis and outside home.