Critical resignation in Latin America: Transnational media and young people

Abstract

Costa Rica is a Latin American country with historical close ties to the United States. This relationship is palpable in the prominence and relevance that content produced in the US has in local media diets. In this article, I analyse how young people in Costa Rica make sense of engaging with transnational media. My goal is to understand the modes in which audiences understand their consumption of foreign media, and how these media operate as a bridge to comprehend broader geopolitical dynamics. For this, I use the theory of cultural proximity to explore the forces that mobilise the reception practices of young audiences and to discern which elements they experience as culturally close. Drawing from a media consumption habits survey, 13 focus group discussions and 35 paired-interviews, I examine the ways in which political and aesthetic evaluations underpin the interpretation of transnational media. Moreover, I show that Costa Rican young audiences adopt a stance of critical resignation: an interpretative operation which entails the acceptance of a geopolitical situation of a perceived submission and inferiority, but a critical awareness of their attitudes towards and acceptance of media texts that come from abroad.