Mexican research on the consumption and appropriation of foreign media contents in Mexico

Abstract

Over the last three decades, research and analysis of transnational communication flows and their reception by different publics, has increased and consolidated. However, scholars have not answer yet many of the fundamental questions about these processes, especially of the reception of foreign contents. There are two main reasons for this situation: on the first hand, dependency and cultural imperialism theories favored flow studies over reception studies (cf. Biltereyst, 1995; De la Garde, 1993; Fejes, 1981). On the other hand, the sectional nature of most of the studies, and their focus on particular countries or cities (except for the few comparative world or regional flow studies like the ones coordinated by Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974; Straubhaar et al., 1994; Varis, 1984), have not been sufficient for a wider understanding about the magnitude of the supply over the years, and about its reception and consumption by publics belonging to different countries. In sum, of the four axes identified by Biltereyst (1995) for the classification of the studies about the role and power of transnational communication (see Figure 1), the one explored the most has been the one related to the flow of transnational messages, while the other three have been scarcely studied empirically (p. 254). If this is the case at the world level, the situation is even more so in the case of Latin America, where for a long time the dependency and cultural imperialism approaches prevailed.