Television, life world and symbolic mobility: slum and slum-dwellers from teenager's points of view

This article discusses the concept of life world, relating it to the hypothesis of symbolic mobility flowing from analysis of reception and discussion of the television series "City of Men" (Cidade dos Homens", Rede Globo, 2002) carried out through focal groups with youth, slum-dwellers and non-slum dwellers in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. We not only consider focal groups as a qualitative research methodology, but as a form of mediation that is capable of stimulating the production of meaning in situations of collective reception, fomenting processes in which representations are questioned and identities are formed and sustained. It is our hypothesis that although representations exhibited by communications media tend to reproduce stereotypes, we can still identify a relative plurality and identify productions that possess an explicit intention to alter such stereotypes. In this regard, communications media provide an important mediation whose ability to filter, "mediatize" and emphasize certain topics offers perspectives, molds images and incites the creation of political and social contexts of debate and interaction. Given the significant presence of communications media in social life, our proposal is to show how televsion and its messages, which play such a fundamental role in cristalizing a stock of knowledge, may also contribute to problematizing and dislocating previously formulated understandings.

life world; symbolic mobility; television; teenagers; slums