UNIVERSITY OF CHILE SOCIAL SCIENCES FACULTY & PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITIES FACULTY Ph.D. Dissertation 2001 Francisco Osorio (
[email protected]) Fulbright/Conicyt Fellow Department of Anthropology at University of Chile Mass Media Anthropology Francisco Fernandez (
[email protected]) Academic Adviser Department of Sociology at University of Chile Acknowledgments When I attended Elihu Katz’s conference at the University of Chile, where I was following the Ph.D. program in philosophy of social science, I never thought I would be writing my dissertation with Katz as a Fulbright/Conicyt Fellow visiting the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I do not have the words to express my gratitude to Prof. Katz for his support. Let me say that I am a newcomer to the field. As a social anthropologist, with both a MA and a Ph.D. in epistemology, I just was in the right place at the right time. This situation has advantages and disadvantages, as everything I supposed. The disadvantage is that I did not know nothing about mass communication (which I could easily apply to anthropology and philosophy). The advantage is that mass communication is an awesome prospect for me. When I started to learn this new language, I was impressed that field anthropologists working in the subject talked about people as consumers, producers or audiences. Before that moment, I only heard about peasants, indigenous peoples or natives. They also speak about exposure. I understood that technology influenced families, but I never thought families could be exposed to a cultural product, like people taking the sun in the beach.