Media in Brazil

‘In Brazil, the nation was produced through the electronic media and not through Benedict Anderson’s ‘print capitalism’ . Discuss the validity of this observation and the implications for an increasingly globalised media apparatus in Brazil.

Brazil today is among the largest, most monopolistic, and politically powerful broadcasting industries in the Western hemisphere. The electronic media has influenced the creation of nationhood during the historical development of the Latin American country. Brazil is formed by a multiethnic society in which nationality is treated more as citizenship rather than ethnicity. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by investigating what is the link between electronic media and the construction of nationhood in this diverse and highly fragmented society. Two particularly influential periods will be examined closer Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo when radio became mass medium and the military dictatorship (1964-1985) when television became popular and available for a larger portion of the population. Benedict Anderson’s theoretical framework on imagined communities and print-capitalism would be closely examined within the context of Brazilian media development and nationhood. The relationship between telenovelas and Brazilian national identity will be also investigated as well as the place of the telenovela in today’s increasingly globalised world.

Benedict Anderson argued that the ‘nation’ is an ‘imagined political community’ in which mass ceremonies play a crucial role in the construction of nationhood. (Porto, 2008, p. 2). Anderson bases his theory on the assumption that when a community is consuming mass media artefact ‘each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion (Anderson, 1993, p. 35) Anderson states that “(...) the convergence of...