https://journals.scientia.international/SIJSocial

Scientia International Journal for

Social Sciences

Vol. 1, 1 (2026)

Type: [Research Article] | DOI: 10.56365/gta2p837

This is an open access publication under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

Media, platforms, and cultural production in Brazil: mediations,

visibility disputes, and public policies

Juliana Porto Machado1*, Bruno Alves Marcelino2, Rodrigo da Costa Segovia3

1Latin American Center for Cultural Studies - CLAEC, Brazil; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8029-5408

2 Latin American Center for Cultural Studies - CLAEC, Brazil; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0638-7889

3 Latin American Center for Cultural Studies - CLAEC, Brazil; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8447-3072

* Corresponding author: juliana.machado@claec.org.

Abstract

This article analyzes the relations between media and cultural production in Brazil through the transition from mass communication

to digital platform ecosystems. Using a theoretical-interpretive design, the study combines a bibliographic review, documentary

analysis, and a state of knowledge on communication, culture, cultural policies, the creative economy, platform studies, and

artificial intelligence. It argues that media do not merely operate as channels of dissemination: they organize visibility regimes,

establish symbolic hierarchies, shape cultural markets, produce public memory, and affect the formation of identities. The article

examines the culture industry, mediation processes, the creative economy, spreadable media, platformization, algorithmic

circulation, and the challenges faced by cultural policies in contexts marked by economic concentration, disinformation, data

capture, and territorial asymmetries. It also draws on 2024 ICT Households data to situate recent online media consumption

practices in Brazil. The article concludes that democratizing cultural production requires the articulation of funding, regulation,

media literacy, digital preservation, public data, and stronger local capacities for creation, circulation, and memory. As a theoretical

and practical contribution, it systematizes an intervention agenda for cultural policies in digital environments.

Keywords: media; cultural production; cultural policies; digital platforms; cultural diversity.

Article details | Open Peer Review

Edited by:

Bruno César Alves Marcelino

Reviewed by:

Ewerton da Silva Ferreira

Fábio do Vale

Citation:

Machado, J. P., Marcelino, B. A., & Segovia, R. da C. (2026). Media, platforms, and cultural production

in Brazil: mediations, visibility disputes, and public policies. Scientia International Journal for Social

Sciences, 1(1), Article ID. https://doi.org/10.56365/gta2p837

Article history

Received: 15/07/2026

Revised: 16/07/2026

Accepted: 19/07/2026

Available: 29/07/2026

Scientia International Journal for Social Sciences 2 of 17

1. Introduction

The relationship between media and cultural production in Brazil requires an approach capable of bringing

together the political economy of communication, cultural studies, public policy, media history, and recent

technological transformations. Cultural production is not limited to the creation of works, events, or artistic

repertoires. It encompasses chains of mediation, institutions, technologies, markets, territories, funding

policies, and audiences that participate in the circulation of social meanings.

In the Brazilian context, this debate assumes particular contours. The historical concentration of

media ownership, the unequal distribution of cultural facilities, regional asymmetries, and the rapid expansion

of digital platforms configure a cultural field marked by tensions between diversity and standardization,

creative autonomy and market dependence, expanded circulation and the invisibilization of local practices.

The same infrastructure that enables the dissemination of works and repertoires previously restricted to

territorial circuits also subjects creators and communities to opaque regimes of curation, ranking,

monetization, and data collection.

The research problem guiding this article may be formulated as follows: how do media

transformations, from mass communication to digital platforms, affect Brazilian cultural production and

public policies aimed at the preservation, circulation, and democratization of culture? This question shifts the

analysis from media as a simple vehicle to media as a structure of social, economic, and symbolic mediation.

The aim is to understand how media select, hierarchize, and render certain repertoires recognizable while

conditioning forms of creation, consumption, memory, and belonging.

The general objective is to analyze the relationships between media and cultural production in Brazil,

considering processes of platformization, visibility disputes, and the challenges posed to cultural policies.

The specific objectives are to discuss theoretical shifts among the culture industry, mass culture, local

cultures, and the creative economy; organize a state of knowledge on media, platforms, and cultural

production; examine the relationship between territorial identities and communicational mediations; and

indicate paths for public policies capable of confronting concentration, disinformation, and inequalities of

access.

Within this framework, the article takes the form of an interpretive state of knowledge. Gaucho

identity is mobilized as a situated analytical key for examining, at the territorial scale, how cultural repertoires

are mediated, valorized, standardized, and reorganized across media and digital environments.

The relevance of this discussion derives from the contemporary context. The expansion of streaming

services, social networks, generative artificial intelligence, recommendation systems, and digital markets has

altered the conditions of cultural circulation. UNESCO (2026) indicates that digital transformation has

expanded tools, markets, and audiences, yet has not guaranteed stable income for most creators and has

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intensified asymmetries among countries, sectors, and cultural agents. In a complementary direction,

UNESCO (2025b) draws attention to the still insufficient presence of culture in global sustainable

development agendas. These findings reinforce the need to understand media and cultural production as a

field of public dispute rather than an exclusively technical or market domain.

2. Methodology

The study adopts a qualitative, bibliographic, documentary, and interpretive approach. The corpus was

organized into three sets of materials. The first comprises classical and contemporary literature on media,

communication, culture, the culture industry, and mediation. The second includes studies on cultural

production, the creative economy, cultural policies, media history, and the cultural field. The third

incorporates normative documents, institutional reports, and public data published through 2026, especially

those related to digital culture, artificial intelligence, the National Culture System, the Paulo Gustavo Law,

the National Aldir Blanc Policy, and the Regulatory Framework for Cultural Funding.

The corpus was constituted through a purposive and progressive selection, without the aim of

conducting a systematic review. The bibliographic scope covers works published between 1969 and 2025,

identified through bibliographic catalogs, academic repositories, and established references in the field. The

documentary corpus comprises legislation, reports, and public datasets available through 2026, consulted on

official portals, including those of the Brazilian Presidency, the Ministry of Culture, UNESCO, and

NIC.br/Cetic.br. The search and exploratory reading were guided by combinations of the terms media,

cultural mediation, culture industry, mass culture, cultural production, creative economy, digital platforms,

platformization, algorithms, artificial intelligence, cultural policies, diversity, and territory.

The analysis mobilized authors who make it possible to discuss cultural mediation from a critical

perspective, including Adorno and Horkheimer, Morin, Hall, Martín-Barbero, García Canclini, Castells,

Kellner, Santos, Silverstone, Setton, and Guareschi. These references contribute to understanding media as

an instance of meaning production, audience formation, the organization of imaginaries, and ideological

dispute. To analyze cultural production as a field of work, management, and policy, the study draws on

Rubim, Poli, and Silva Junior. The discussion of platformization, data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence

incorporates Srnicek, Van Dijck, Poell, De Waal, Couldry, Mejias, Nieborg, and Duffy, together with recent

UNESCO reports.

The selection criteria were operationalized by requiring each item to correspond directly to at least

one analytical category, together with identifiable authorship, theoretical and methodological consistency,

and the capacity to engage with Brazilian and Latin American contexts. Opinion pieces lacking an analytical

basis, materials without identifiable authorship, and dissemination content without conceptual or

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documentary contributions to the research were excluded. The reading was guided by the following

categories: mediation, culture industry, mass culture, local culture, the field of cultural production, creative

economy, platformization, visibility, regulation, cultural policies, and diversity.

The analytical procedure consisted of thematic reading, comparison among theoretical frameworks,

and critical reconstruction of the main shifts in the debate. This is not an exhaustive bibliometric survey, but

an interpretive state of knowledge. The proposal is to bring together contributions for understanding how

media operate in cultural production and how public policies may respond to changes introduced by digital

platforms and artificial intelligence. The article also uses gaucho identity as a situated analytical case because

it enables observation of relationships among regional media, memory, tradition, market, and territoriality.

3. State of knowledge: media, culture, and cultural production

The state of knowledge on media and cultural production can be organized into five movements. The first is

the critique of the culture industry associated with the Frankfurt School, which interpreted the conversion of

culture into a commodity as part of capitalist rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer (1985) observed that the

standardization of symbolic goods tends to reduce aesthetic experience to repetitive consumption, shaping

modes of perception compatible with social reproduction. Although this reading has limitations, it remains

useful for analyzing concentration, serialization, format standardization, and the subordination of creation to

profitability criteria.

The second movement shifts the analysis toward mass culture and processes of mediation. Morin

(1969) showed that mass culture also creates shared repertoires, modern mythologies, and forms of collective

identification. Hall (2003), in proposing the encoding/decoding model, demonstrated that reception does not

automatically reproduce the meanings encoded by senders, because audiences perform negotiated or

oppositional readings based on their social and cultural repertoires. Martín-Barbero (2003), by proposing a

move from media to mediations, removed the public from the position of passive receiver and restored

everyday life, popular matrices, and reception practices to the center of analysis. García Canclini (1997)

added that Latin America is marked by mixtures, appropriations, and reconfigurations among tradition,

modernity, consumption, and popular practices.

The third movement focuses on media as an instance of reality construction and public dispute.

Kellner (2001) argues that media culture has become one of the main agencies of socialization in

contemporary societies, circulating images, sounds, and spectacles that shape identities and worldviews while

functioning as an arena of dispute among social groups with different interests. Guareschi (2008) and Setton

(2010) analyze media as a socializing matrix capable of ordering themes, languages, behaviors, and cultural

repertoires. Silverstone (2005), in turn, understands media as part of everyday life, articulated with the moral,

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political, and affective experience of subjects. Vasconcelos's (2021) examination of media, conservatism, and

disinformation reinforces the view that communication media participate in the formation of political and

cultural environments by producing frames that legitimize or delegitimize actors, agendas, and worldviews.

The fourth movement concerns the organization of cultural production as a field of work,

management, and policy. The collection edited by Linda Rubim (2005) contributes to understanding cultural

production as a practice that articulates creation, planning, dissemination, management, financing, and

mediation among artists, institutions, and audiences. Drawing on Bourdieu's (1996) field theory, Poli (2021)

proposes understanding the field of cultural and creative production as a space of relationships, capitals,

hierarchies, and disputes. This reading shows that cultural production operates between symbolic and

economic logics, in permanent tension among autonomy, recognition, the market, and public policies.

The fifth movement follows the incorporation of the creative economy, digital platforms, and artificial

intelligence into the vocabulary of cultural policies. In analyzing the network society, Castells (1999) had

already identified the growing centrality of information, knowledge, and digital networks in the organization

of production, power, and cultural experience. Silva Junior (2021) shows that the concepts of cultural

industries, creative industries, and the creative economy reorganize connections among culture, development,

and the market, especially within Mercosur. This vocabulary expanded the presence of culture in agendas of

development, innovation, tourism, and regional integration, but it also created the risk of reducing culture to

economic performance and relegating its identity-related, aesthetic, historical, and civic dimensions to the

background.

Recent scholarship indicates that media and culture must be analyzed through a connected

perspective. Barbosa and Gutiérrez (2022) argue that media history in Latin America should be approached

through connections, transits, and cultural territorialities, avoiding analyses isolated by country, medium, or

technology. This proposition is productive for understanding the current scenario, in which cultural

circulation occurs among television, radio, platforms, social networks, festivals, funding calls, digital

markets, and transnational public policies. The analytical challenge is to observe these connections without

erasing inequalities of power.

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Table 1 - Synthesis of the theoretical movements mobilized in the state of knowledge

Analytical movement

Contribution to the article

Reference authors

Culture industry

Problematizes commodification, standardization, and

concentration of symbolic goods.

Adorno; Horkheimer

Cultural mediations

Restores audiences, everyday life, reception, and

hybridization to the center of analysis.

Hall; Martín-Barbero; García

Canclini

Media and public dispute

Analyzes framing, reality production, socialization, and

disinformation.

Kellner; Guareschi; Setton;

Silverstone; Vasconcelos

Field of cultural

production

Interprets creation, management, capitals, hierarchies, and

cultural labor.

Bourdieu; Rubim; Poli; Silva

Junior

Platforms and data

Updates the debate on algorithms, digital infrastructure, AI,

and cultural circulation.

Srnicek; Van Dijck; Poell;

Couldry; Mejias; UNESCO

4. Media, culture, and symbolic production

Defining media solely as a set of technical and institutional means responsible for the large-scale production

and dissemination of messages would be insufficient for this article. Media participate in cultural production

because they select repertoires, assign visibility, organize forms of recognition, and create conditions of

circulation. Newspapers, radio, television, cinema, digital platforms, and social networks do not neutrally

transport ready-made content. They participate in the constitution of content itself because they condition

formats, durations, languages, modes of presentation, success metrics, and possibilities of remuneration.

The transition from mass communication media to the digital environment did not eliminate classical

problems of concentration, standardization, and commodification. Some of these issues were displaced to

new private infrastructures of symbolic circulation. Digital platforms promise openness, participation, and

access, but operate through algorithms, contracts, recommendation systems, data collection, and

monetization rules. The result is ambivalent: local creators may reach larger audiences, while their visibility

becomes dependent on opaque technical systems and shifting commercial criteria.

This ambivalence requires overcoming two forms of reductionism. The first treats media as absolute

manipulation and fails to recognize appropriation, resistance, and creative uses by subjects and social groups.

The second treats digital technologies as naturally democratic environments and ignores asymmetries of

infrastructure, literacy, income, territory, race, gender, and class. Brazilian cultural production develops

within this interval: it creates, negotiates, resists, adapts, and disputes recognition under unequal conditions.

At the symbolic level, media operate as a system of legitimation. Certain cultural practices acquire

the status of heritage, spectacle, trend, or exportable product, while others remain classified as local,

peripheral, amateur, or commercially unprofitable. These classifications are not neutral. They affect funding

calls, sponsorship, journalistic coverage, audience formation, and social memory. In a country of extensive

cultural diversity, the dispute for visibility is also a dispute over the right to public presence.

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Digital technologies intensify this process. Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2014) describe the phenomenon

through the notion of spreadable media, according to which the value of content depends on its capacity for

circulation, commentary, appropriation, and recreation by audiences. Social networks and video services

reward frequency, visual appeal, rapid adaptation, and engagement. This may favor popular, musical,

memetic, and performative languages, but it also pressures cultural agents to adapt their creations to brief,

repeatable, and quantifiable formats. The logic of metrics becomes part of the creative process.

5. Cultural production, creative economy, and field disputes

Cultural production can be understood as a field of relations in which different agents dispute material and

symbolic resources. Artists, producers, managers, technicians, communicators, curators, sponsors, platforms,

public agencies, and audiences occupy distinct positions. Each position holds specific forms of capital:

economic, cultural, social, symbolic, technical, and territorial. This structure helps explain why certain groups

are able to access resources, circulate through festivals, obtain media coverage, and reach markets, while

others remain restricted to local or informal circuits.

Bourdieu's (1996) approach, revisited by Poli (2021), demonstrates that the cultural field is organized

not solely by the aesthetic quality of works, but by relations of force, rules of legitimation, and disputes over

authority. The incorporation of the creative economy broadens this framework. By bringing together the arts,

cultural industries, design, fashion, gastronomy, audiovisual production, games, advertising, software, and

innovation, the field comes to include agents operating at very different economic scales. This expansion

may create opportunities for recognition and financing, yet it also shifts cultural policy toward the language

of entrepreneurship, innovation, and competitiveness.

In Brazil, this tension is particularly pronounced. The Federal Constitution recognizes culture as a

right and assigns the State the duty to ensure the conditions for its exercise (Brazil, 1988), but in practice the

sustainability of cultural production is often assessed in market terms. Funding calls, sponsorships, awards,

incentive laws, digital platforms, and audience economies coexist with community practices, informal

collectives, popular cultures, and territorial memories that do not always conform to business models. The

question that arises is: which forms of cultural production are recognized as legitimate when the dominant

vocabulary becomes that of economic creativity?

Silva Junior (2021) contributes to this discussion by analyzing culture, creativity, and development

within Mercosur. He shows that small and medium-sized cultural producers face obstacles to

internationalization, circulation, and entry into expanded markets, even though regional initiatives have

created spaces for exchange. The analysis indicates that the discourse of creativity and development must be

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confronted with the concrete conditions of cultural work: informality, instability, unequal access to financing,

limited distribution capacity, and asymmetries among countries and regions.

Contemporary cultural production therefore lies between two logics. On one side is the desire to

expand audiences, access markets, professionalize production chains, and create economic sustainability. On

the other is the need to preserve symbolic autonomy, diversity of repertoires, community practices, local

memory, and cultural rights. A democratic public policy must recognize this duality without reducing the

cultural field to financial return or romanticizing precariousness as a natural feature of creation.

6. Platformization, algorithms, and new conditions of visibility

Platformization has become one of the most consequential changes for cultural production in the twenty-first

century. Srnicek (2017) describes platforms as digital infrastructures positioned between different groups of

users, extracting, processing, and monetizing data generated by the interactions they organize. Van Dijck,

Poell, and De Waal (2018) extend this approach through the notion of the platform society, in which the

logics of data, connectivity, and market valuation of large private platforms penetrate spheres previously

governed by other rationalities, such as health, education, transportation, and culture.

In addressing cultural production, Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy (2021) describe platformization as a

process that reorganizes the technical infrastructure, business models, and governance of the creative

industries, transferring part of decision-making power to technology companies located outside the cultural

field itself. In operational terms, the phenomenon designates the reorganization of social, economic, and

cultural activities around digital platforms that mediate relationships, collect data, classify content, and

establish rules of circulation.

In the cultural field, this change alters the very notion of the public. Couldry and Mejias (2019) call

this process data colonialism: the systematic appropriation of social life as raw material for value extraction.

Watching, liking, commenting, sharing, and saving content are converted into marketable data. Under this

logic, the audience is no longer treated solely as a group of spectators or consumers, but is converted into

profiles, retention, engagement, and segmentation.

Recent UNESCO reports reinforce the need to situate this process within the debate on cultural

diversity. The report Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity 2026 indicates that digital transformation has

expanded tools, markets, and audiences, while intensifying inequalities, making incomes more precarious,

and increasing intellectual property risks for creators (UNESCO, 2026). The document draws attention to

concentration in a small number of streaming platforms and to poorly transparent curation systems capable

of marginalizing lesser-known creators.

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Generative artificial intelligence adds new layers to this scenario. Tools capable of producing texts,

images, sounds, videos, and scripts expand creative resources and may assist cultural preservation,

accessibility, translation, and documentation. At the same time, they generate conflicts over authorship,

remuneration, the use of works in training datasets, the substitution of creative labor, aesthetic

standardization, and the proliferation of synthetic content. UNESCO's report on artificial intelligence and

culture, released in 2025 in the context of MONDIACULT, frames AI as a matter of cultural governance,

creators' rights, and diversity (UNESCO, 2025a).

Platforms should therefore not be understood as neutral spaces of circulation. They function as private

cultural infrastructures that mediate access, memory, and income. For Brazilian cultural production, this

raises the problem of cultural sovereignty in contemporary terms: how can diversity, fair remuneration, the

presence of different languages, territories, and repertoires, the preservation of collections, and the protection

of creators be guaranteed in environments controlled by transnational corporations?

7. Media consumption and online cultural circulation

García Canclini (2008) observed that readers, spectators, and Internet users converge into hybrid audiences,

combining practices of reading, visuality, and navigation previously distributed across different media.

Official Brazilian data make it possible to measure this convergence empirically. In the 2024 ICT Households

survey, among Internet users in Brazil, 77% reported watching videos, programs, films, or series online; 76%

listening to music; 55% reading newspapers, magazines, or news; 46% watching live streams; 38% playing

online games; 34% listening to podcasts; and 14% visiting exhibitions or museums online (NIC.br, 2024), as

summarized in Figure 1.

These data do not replace qualitative analysis of cultural mediations, but they reveal an uneven

distribution among activities. The near equivalence between watching videos, programs, films, or series

(77%) and listening to music (76%) indicates the predominance of audiovisual and sound-based languages.

Reading news (55%) and watching live streams (46%) occupy an intermediate range, while online games

(38%) and podcasts (34%) represent established but less extensive circuits. Virtual visits to exhibitions or

museums (14%) stand 63 percentage points below video consumption, showing that connectivity and digital

availability do not, by themselves, ensure diversified access to cultural repertoires. This distribution helps

explain why cultural policies directed toward digital environments must distinguish among Internet access,

cultural participation, discoverability, preservation of collections, and audience development.

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Figure 1 - Multimedia activities performed by Internet users in Brazil (2024)

Source: prepared by the authors based on NIC.br (2024), indicator C7 of the 2024 ICT Households survey.

These theoretical and empirical transformations can be synthesized into five analytical dimensions.

Table 2 organizes shifts between the logic of mass communication media and the logic of digital platforms

in the production and circulation of culture.

Table 2 - Shifts in cultural production in media and digital environments

Dimension

Mass media

Digital platforms

Dissemination

Linear programming, editorial schedules, and dependence

on broadcasters, newspapers, radio, and television.

Continuous, segmented, and

algorithmic circulation

oriented by retention and

recommendation.

Visibility

Journalistic coverage, presence in broadcasting,

institutional recognition, and sponsorship.

Metrics, engagement,

discoverability, platform rules,

and targeted advertising.

Value

Audience, prestige, sponsorship, product sales, and

editorial legitimacy.

Data, attention, subscriptions,

monetization, virality, and

capture of interactions.

Risk

Ownership concentration, format standardization, and

silencing of local practices.

Algorithmic opacity,

precarization, technological

dependence, and data

extraction.

Public policy

Democratization of communication, funding, and expanded

access to cultural facilities.

Digital governance, copyright,

public data, diversity, and

media literacy.

Source: prepared by the authors based on the literature discussed in the article.

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8. Identity, territory, and media culture: the gaucho case

The relationship between media and cultural production can be observed in a situated manner through the

case of gaucho identity. Santos (1996) teaches that territory is not a neutral physical given, but an inseparable

set of systems of objects and systems of actions in permanent historical reconfiguration. This perspective

allows the territory of Rio Grande do Sul to be treated not as a fixed setting, but as a construction shaped by

flows of communication and cultural production.

The construction of the gaucho imaginary articulates literature, music, radio, television, festivals,

traditionalist centers, tourism, clothing, gastronomy, regional memory, and policies of symbolic valorization.

This identity should not be treated as a natural given, but as a historical elaboration shaped by the selection

of references, silences, conflicts, and institutionalization processes. The theory of invented traditions

proposed by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1984) offers a key for understanding how certain practices are presented

as ancient, continuous, and representative of a group, although they are reorganized at specific historical

moments.

In the gaucho case, regional media helped stabilize images, narratives, and characters associated with

the pampas, the figure of the rural gaucho, Farroupilha Week, nativist music, and rituals of belonging.

Television programs, radio broadcasts, newspapers, and public events contributed to expanding the

circulation of these repertoires. On one hand, such mediation may value cultural practices, expand audiences,

create recognition, and strengthen territorial bonds. On the other, it may produce homogeneous images that

reduce the internal diversity of regional culture, rendering invisible women, Black and Indigenous

populations, border communities, urban and peripheral groups, and other experiences that also compose the

territory.

Gaucho identity exemplifies how cultural production becomes a symbolic and economic resource.

Events, festivals, tourism products, territorial brands, performances, handicrafts, music, gastronomy, and

audiovisual production mobilize signs of belonging. Regional culture begins to circulate through value chains

involving media, markets, memory, and public policies. The challenge is to prevent identity valorization from

becoming folkloric standardization, while preserving space for conflict, diversity, and the renewal of cultural

practices.

In digital environments, these repertoires no longer depend exclusively on regional programming and

increasingly circulate through video and audio platforms and social networks, where automated

recommendations, engagement metrics, hashtags, and short-form formats condition their discoverability

(Van Dijck et al., 2018; Poell et al., 2021). This circulation may expand audiences for music, festivals,

gastronomy, and territorial imagery, but it also tends to favor easily recognizable and repeatable signs,

reinforcing selective representations of gaucho identity. Because the present study did not track specific

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profiles, content, or streaming catalogs, this relationship is formulated as an interpretive hypothesis and a

research agenda for future mappings of platforms, cultural agents, and audiences.

This example broadens the reflection to other Brazilian territorialities. As Santos (2000) observes,

contemporary globalization simultaneously produces technical unification and the fragmentation of lived

experience, so the same communicational infrastructure that homogenizes repertoires may also support local

identity reaffirmations when political and material conditions exist. Amazonian, Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous,

sertanejo, riverine, border, peripheral, and urban cultures face similar disputes. Media may expand repertoires

and create recognition; they may also exoticize, simplify, or submit local expressions to external patterns of

consumption.

9. Public policies, regulation, and the sustainability of cultural production

The relationship between media and cultural production cannot be addressed solely at the level of individual

creation. It requires public policies capable of articulating funding, regulation, training, memory, and

circulation. In Brazil, recent advances involving the National Culture System, the Paulo Gustavo Law, the

National Aldir Blanc Policy, and the Regulatory Framework for Cultural Funding reposition the debate on

cultural sustainability. The National Culture System, regulated by Law No. 14,835/2024, organizes cultural

management through collaboration among federal entities and civil society, reinforcing the idea of cultural

policy as a continuous State action (Brazil, 2024a; Ministry of Culture, 2026).

The Paulo Gustavo Law, approved in 2022, responded to an emergency context of crisis in the cultural

sector following the COVID-19 pandemic, with a strong presence of audiovisual initiatives and decentralized

cultural actions (Brazil, 2022a). The National Aldir Blanc Policy established a continuing funding policy

based on regular transfers from the Federal Government to states, the Federal District, and municipalities

(Brazil, 2022b). These experiences expanded the reach of cultural financing and highlighted the role of

municipalities in policy implementation. They also exposed challenges: unequal technical capacity,

difficulties in accountability procedures, digital barriers, weak councils, and the need for permanent training

of cultural agents.

The Regulatory Framework for Cultural Funding, established by Law No. 14,903/2024 (Brazil,

2024b), responds to some of these challenges by creating legal instruments specific to the cultural sector. Its

relevance lies in recognizing that culture has modes of production distinct from public works, administrative

procurement, or ordinary service provision. Awards, grants, cultural implementation agreements, and other

instruments permit greater alignment between legal norms and cultural practice. This adjustment may reduce

bureaucratic barriers when accompanied by transparency, social oversight, and technical guidance for

applicants.

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The updating of funding policies must engage with the media dimension. Producing culture today

involves disputing digital circulation, documenting collections, protecting copyright, dealing with platforms,

creating communication strategies, and understanding metrics. Funding policies that ignore these dimensions

tend to finance production without ensuring conditions of access for audiences. Funding calls and programs

may therefore include training in communication, digital preservation, accessibility, rights management,

distribution, curation, cultural data, and media literacy.

Another issue concerns platform regulation. The concentration of visibility in transnational

companies creates dependencies that cannot be resolved through local funding alone. It is necessary to discuss

algorithmic transparency, creator remuneration, data protection, responses to disinformation, preservation of

digital archives, and the promotion of cultural diversity. UNESCO (2026) draws attention to the risks of

nontransparent curation and to the limited capacity of countries to produce statistics on digital cultural

consumption. Without public data, cultural policy remains dependent on information controlled by private

platforms.

10. Toward an agenda for research and public intervention

The analysis points to an agenda for research and public intervention in five directions. The first involves

mapping the actual circuits through which Brazilian cultural production circulates, considering television,

radio, platforms, funding calls, festivals, social networks, community spaces, and cultural institutions. There

are still few integrated studies capable of following the trajectory of a cultural product from its creation to its

digital, territorial, and economic circulation.

The second direction concerns the production of cultural data. Indicators on consumption, circulation,

labor, remuneration, diversity, and digital access are indispensable for policy design. The absence of data

favors decisions based on perception, political pressure, or media visibility. Public statistics should include

territorial, racial, generational, gender, disability, and field-of-activity categories, preventing cultural policy

from reproducing historical invisibilities.

The third direction concerns training. Bévort and Belloni (2009) argue that media education,

understood as the development of critical competencies to produce, interpret, and evaluate media content, is

a necessary condition for subjects and collectives to exercise autonomy in relation to communication media

and digital platforms. Cultural agents need support in management, communication, copyright, accessibility,

executive production, accountability, and digital preservation. Such training should not impose homogeneous

business models, but should offer tools that allow different groups to circulate with autonomy and security.

The fourth direction involves regulation and rights. Platforms and artificial intelligence systems

reorganize culture through data, recommendations, and synthetic content. The defense of cultural diversity

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must engage with copyright protection, transparency in model training, creator remuneration, responses to

deepfakes, preservation of collections, and guarantees of access. The debate on AI and culture should begin

with questions about who creates, who is remunerated, who controls data, and which repertoires are

recognized as knowledge.

The fifth direction is territorial. Brazilian cultural production cannot be considered solely from the

perspective of major urban centers. Small municipalities, border regions, rural territories, quilombola

communities, Indigenous peoples, peripheral areas, and medium-sized cities require policies for circulation,

memory, and communication. The decentralization of funding will have lasting effects only when

accompanied by infrastructure, connectivity, training, and exhibition spaces. Cultural diversity depends on

material conditions for its public existence.

11. Final considerations

The relationship between media and cultural production in Brazil constitutes a field of permanent tensions.

Media expand circulation, create shared repertoires, and enable public recognition, while also hierarchizing

visibility, standardizing formats, and subjecting cultural practices to market criteria. Digital platforms

intensify this ambivalence: they offer access to larger audiences and creative tools while concentrating data,

monetization, curation, and recommendation power.

The trajectory analyzed shows that cultural production cannot be understood without attention to the

mediations that make it visible. The transition from the culture industry to platformization does not eliminate

the critique of commodification; it relocates that critique to new technical and economic environments.

Algorithms, metrics, artificial intelligence, streaming, and social networks reorganize disputes over

audiences, income, and memory. In this context, local and popular practices may gain new opportunities for

circulation, but they continue to face inequalities of infrastructure, recognition, and access to resources.

The article's specific contribution lies in integrating these frameworks into five analytical movements,

comparing mass communication media with digital platforms, and using gaucho identity as a situated key for

examining disputes over visibility, territory, and cultural policy. The state of knowledge indicates that the

subject requires articulation among communication, culture, public policy, and political economy. The

contribution of the Frankfurt School remains relevant for thinking about standardization; British and Latin

American cultural studies help explain encoding, mediations, hybridizations, and appropriations; field theory

enables analysis of disputes among forms of capital and positions; reflection on space and territory situates

cultural production in concrete geographies; and platform and artificial intelligence studies update the debate

on concentration, data, curation, and rights. None of these frameworks, in isolation, accounts for the

complexity of the phenomenon.

Scientia International Journal for Social Sciences 15 of 17

Recent Brazilian cultural policies, especially the National Culture System, the Paulo Gustavo Law,

the National Aldir Blanc Policy, and the Regulatory Framework for Cultural Funding, offer paths for

expanding public capacity for funding and decentralization. However, democratizing cultural production also

requires advances in communication: visibility, distribution, media literacy, digital preservation, public data,

platform regulation, and the protection of creators. Funding creation without addressing the conditions of

circulation leaves a decisive part of the cultural process under the control of private agents.

Brazilian cultural production should therefore be understood as a right, a form of work, a domain of

memory, and a symbolic dispute. Its sustainability depends on funding policies, democratic regulation,

continuing education, and recognition of the territorialities that produce culture in everyday life. In the

context of expanding platforms and artificial intelligence, the challenge is not to reject technology, but to

dispute its uses, rules, and effects so that culture may remain a space of creation, diversity, and public life.

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