The notion of space and the practices related to media within the contemporary rural

Abstract

In the research Communication technologies in daily practices: the case of families related to the agroindustrial tobacco chain, developed in the city of Vale do Sol (RS), one of the strategies for collecting information in the field was to focus on the interviewees’ means of communication predilection. The questions "what is your favorite mean of communication?" and "where do you usually use it?" have spawned questions about space, taken here as a category of analysis (Harvey, 2006). From the tensions and spatial complexities, such as the relations between rural and urban, or house and street, a problematization is proposed to understand the uses and appropriations of communication technologies (Silverstone, Hirsch, Morley, 1996). For this purpose, we consider the physical aspect of families' dwelling and work places, and the abstract, as the symbolic implication of another duality: modernity and tradition. Thus, we observe dynamics of objectification in the home, through different forms of spatial differentiation, implicated in private or shared consumption processes and also in generational gap.