Por una sociosemiótica de los discursos de la comunicación de masas

At the beginnings of the spread of semiotics (in the early 1960's) the mass media became a regular subject for study. However, now that the discipline has become institutionalised, there seems to have been a loss of interest in the media. At most, they are used simply as a "testing ground" in the development of general semiotics. The present article proposes a definite formulation of a semiotic theory of mass communication which could account for the specificity of the phenomenon without being entirely subordinate to the postulations of the general theory. Thus, the article reviews the most widely known proposals for the semiotic study of the mass media: Barthes, Fabbri, Greimas, Moragas, Baudrillard. It finally proposes a different epistemological course, which could be encapsulated in the following points: 1) Given that "mass culture" as an object is unviable, the study of the process by which the mass media develop and become an integral part of societies (procesos de mass-mediatización) would be needed. 2) The future of socioserniotics in this field. 3) The pressing need to construct a theoretical framework for the notion of discourse as a productive instance of texts and as an area of posible cornrnunicative und noncornrnunicative actions. Finally 4) Channeling research towards the establishng of a typology of discourse capable of functioning as a geography of socially shaped comunicative spaces

Crisis de educación, crisis de comunicación

La UNESCO presentó un informe en el año 1967 que se intitulaba La crisis mundial de la educación (Coombs, 1971). Aquel texto denunciaba una crisis educativa de alcance planetario. De esto, hace ya más de treinta años y, sin embargo, no se puede decir que hayamos salido de la crisis ni que ésta haya aminorado en ninguna zona del mundo. La tensión hacia el cambio en la educación es muy fuerte, en los contenidos , en los métodos, en las tecnologías, en la mentalidad de los estudiantes, en las exigencias del entorno. Lo cual crea incertidumbres, indefiniciones y, en suma, malestar. Los medios de comunicación, por su lado, viven su propia crisis. En la última década han sufrido los cambios de mayor importancia de toda su existencia: Internet, las telecomunicaciones, la digitalización de la información, la globalización. Desde un punto de vista cultural, tales transformaciones están suponiendo alteraciones más graves que las que originó en su día el desarrollo de la imprenta. Nos recuerdan, de alguna manera, la revolución que la invención de la escritura introdujo en las formas intelectuales de la humanidad: una revolución global que trastoca los límites de la subjetividad, lo público, lo privado, la libertad y el control.UNESCO gave a report titled The Global Learning Crisis in the 1967 (Coombs, 1971). That text reported a worldwide educational scale crisis. It has been more than thirty years and, however, it cannot be said that we have got out of this crisis, and neither that it has reduced in any part of the world. The tension towards change in education is very strong in contents, methodology, technologies, students’ thinking, or the demands of environment. This creates uncertainties, lack of definitions, and, in sum, discomfort. Media, on their side, live their own crisis. In the last century, they have suffered important major changes from their entire existence: the internet, telecommunication, digitalization of information, globalization. From a cultural point of view, such transformations suppose more severe alternations than those originated by the printing press in its days. Somehow, they remember us the revolution that the invention of writing introduced in the intellectual forms of humanity: a global revolution which disrupts subjectivity limits, as well as public, private, freedom and control limits too