Reconfiguration of public media space. Collective actor’s self-narratives (Córdoba, Argentina), disputes of meaning and proletarian public sphere

Abstract

The goal of this article is to describe and analyze some features of technologically mediated public space, from the point of view of contemporary collective actors in the city of Córdoba, Argentina. We work on self-narratives that these actors produce, and through which they dispute social meaning and identities as workers. We will specifically refer to three groups: men and women that recollect paper, cardboard and trash for recycling in carts pulled by horses, fruit and vegetable carriers in food markets, and sexual laborers.

We anticipate the hypothesis that mediated public space involves transformations in the contents and ways that actors organize what is visible and not visible, what is imaginable and unimaginable (and we know that imagination is central in the proposal of O. Kluge and A. Negt regarding proletarian public space). This is expressed in self-narratives that the collective actors elaborate in face-to-face interactions and in their relations with communitarian and alternative media, especially in hypertextual formats.