The Culture Industry in Brazil

From the ‘Classic’ Model to the Digital Media

Abstract

The ‘classic' model of the culture industry, according to Adorno's and Horkheimer's typification in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, arises in the first decades of the 20th century, based in the appropriation, by the then rising big capital, of technologies of reproducing sounds and images like movies and gramophone with the possibility of broadcasting them, as in the case of radio and TV. According to this model, Brazil was one of the first countries in the world to have an indigenous culture industry, since radio broadcasting began there in the twenties and in the thirties appeared the earliest motion pictures produced in the country. In addition to it, television broadcasting in Brazil began to work as early as in 1950 and had since then an enormous development. As is broadly known, around 1990 culture industry as a whole went through a strong process of modification, due to the overcoming of the analogical technology and prevailing of digital media, on one hand, and as a consequence of the so called globalization, on the other. Also the Brazilian culture industry underwent this situation and the analysis of that process is the very topic of this article.