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
