Media and Cultural Consumption by Young Students in the City of São Paulo, Brazil: Evidences of Digital Divide, Possibilities of Cosmopolitanism

This paper presents the initial findings of a Brazilian project, which is part of an international research group, studying youth cultures in the age of globalization. It aims to develop a comparative study from the cultural perspective of globalization on the construction of aesthetic cosmopolitanism among young people from France, Canada, Australia, and Brazil. Our aim here specifically is to understand the cultural consumption of young students from São Paulo and their uses of different media for this matter, in hybrid forms (mainly digital). The analysis of empirical data presented is built upon 52 exploratory questionnaires and 40 interviews conducted with young students (from 18 to 24 year old) living in São Paulo, Brazil. In order to understand the Brazilian context in this analysis, we performed a triangulation with secondary data from “Brazilian digital youth” by IBOPE (2012) and “Connected youth” by Telefonica Foundation/USP (2014). Based on the analysis, we reflect on two central topics: 1) evidence of a digital divide, according to their socio-economic profile and their access to information/entertainment, and 2) possibilities of cosmopolitan encounters, through the consumption of international cultural products and the search of information regarding other countries and cultures