Youth consumption of political information. Structural and reticular analysis of university students' media preferences in Cordoba (Argentina, 2012)

By considering the place of media consumption in structuring the daily lives of the younger generations, the article discusses the identitarian character of their information preferences in cultural, political and ideological terms. On a base of 230 semi-structured surveys conducted in 2012 between university students from Cordoba (Argentina), these preferences are de-composed and re-build by using two complementary methodological approaches. First, media and favorite formats are described, by identifying editorial affinity links among favorite alternatives as well as by assessing their significant association with the ideological self-placement. Second, from a relational distribution of individual responses and by applying the method of social network analysis, it is recognized specific attributes and structural properties of shared consumption patterns. The results show differential political-ideological appropriations (massive, pluralistic and contrastive), being possible to distinguish the centrality and symbolic authority of the main preferred means in the context of a relatively homogeneous and concentrated structure of consumption in a way consistent with the terms of local market of monopolistic trend.