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Fotonovelas : Message Creation and Reception
Author(s) -
Flora Carnelia Butler
Publication year - 1980
Publication title -
the journal of popular culture
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1540-5931
pISSN - 0022-3840
DOI - 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1980.1403_524.x
Subject(s) - multinational corporation , comics , publishing , subject (documents) , latin americans , homogeneous , production (economics) , sociology , media studies , popular culture , advertising , history , political science , business , library science , computer science , law , economics , physics , macroeconomics , thermodynamics
Like the comic book, which is examined elsewhere in this volume‐see the articles by Hinds and Tatum‐the fotonovela is widely disseminated in certain countries in Latin America, thus making it an appropriate subject for a study of mass culture. Cornelia Butler Flora discusses the production of the fotonovela in Colombia, focusing on the messages it contains and how these messages interact with the readers. She contrasts an independent production system of creating this popular genre with a multinational publication house which primarily reproduces Mexican fotonovelas. Her methodologies‐interviews, quantitative and structural content analysis, of the readers' letters, and in‐depth interviews‐serve as a model to others undertaking research in this and related areas. Her description of the production and producers o f fotonovelas is both informative and interesting, giving the reader an insight into the inner workings of the popular publishing business. Flora concludes that, in general, the independent Colombian producers are more responsive to their readers' comments than the multinational producer. She also raises a disturbing question regarding the accuracy of most studies of mass culture that assume how the reader is interpreting the symbols and the content and that within a particular country the audience is homogeneous in its response.