ABSTRACT
As one of us (Kottak 1990) saw clearly during his research on the impact of television in Brazil, the typical media consumer is not the passive “couch potato” that dominates our stereotypes of a TV aficionado. Instead, people, whether rural Brazilians or Americans in rural suburban areas such as Dexter, actively evaluate and use media in ways that make sense to them. Program choices and preferences reflect social contrasts, power differentials, and variant individual predispositions. People continue watching, listening, or reading because they find
meaning in their texts of choice. In one town in southern Brazil, Alberto Costa (see Kottak 1990) found that women and young adults of both sexes were particularly attracted to telenovelas (melodramatic nightly programs often compared to American soap operas, usually featuring sophisticated urban settings). In the small community that Costa studied, those relatively powerless social groups used the more liberal content of telenovelas to challenge conservative local norms.
