Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The article focuses on the government communication practices that occurred in the Ministries of Education, Health and Social Development during the presidencies of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2011-2015) and Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) in Argentina. In this framework, we reflect on the professional role of government communicators in charge of the task and analyze the place of the press and communication area in the institutional architecture of national ministries. In this sense, it is observed that during the Kirchner government the leadership was in the ministerial communication teams, while in the management of the Cambiemos alliance the decisions fell on the Head of Government and the Presidency of the Nation. On the other hand, it is observed that the diversification and specialization of the area is a characteristic feature of both administrations, which allowed communication to gain centrality from the directive and management point of view, although the consideration of professionals continued to occupy, at the operational level, a traditional or secondary place.

En los últimos años se fueron instalando inquietudes que interpelan el ecosistema mediático-digital mediante distintas problematizaciones en el ámbito académico, preguntas formuladas en escenarios mediáticos y estrategias discursivas en el marco de campañas electorales. Estas preguntas procuran comprender por qué predominan ciertos discursos por encima de otros y en qué condiciones, además de reflexionar sobre la conformación de aquello que importa y si tal influencia sigue siendo generalizada. Las redes sociales, por ejemplo, ¿reproducen el temario iniciado por los medios de élite o pujan por instalar asuntos de interés de públicos más extensos, que rebasen los circuitos convencionales de la información?

El libro The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now, escrito por Pablo Boczkowski y Eugenia Mitchelstein (2021), ofrece un fascinante recorrido intelectual por dimensiones importantes del entorno digital –aquel donde, a la par de los entornos natural y urbano, se gestiona la vida diaria en la actualidad–. A través de un relato coral, que combina las voces de 60 autores del campo de la comunicación y los medios, el libro genera cuatro contribuciones destacadas para estudiosos de la mediatización y los medios digitales, también para lectores que usen –o rechacen el uso– de las tecnologías de comunicación e información contemporáneas y que deseen comprender teórica y empíricamente sus propias prácticas. Primero, el libro presenta y organiza los hallazgos más relevantes respecto de cómo se vive, aprende, trabaja, y juega digitalmente. Segundo, al visibilizar y tejer lazos entre voces expertas que trabajan con temáticas y perspectivas disímiles, el libro opera interdisciplinariamente: genera así diálogos y espacios de encuentro teóricos y metodológicos en un campo intelectual que se ha caracterizado por su hiperfragmentación. Tercero, corre a los medios digitales de la posición de objetos para reubicarlos como lugares donde se vive, sin quitarle centralidad a la agencia de los usuarios. Cuarto, propone una definición de entorno digital –caracterizado por su totalidad, dualidad, conflicto e indeterminación– que sortea a la tendencia contemporánea hacia la reificación de pánicos morales sobre los supuestos efectos negativos de las tecnologías de la comunicación e información.

The aim of the article is to understand and analyze the meanings that two competitive arenas –the media and the feminist movements–built on the same topic, the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy (VIP). To carry out the study, quantitative and qualitative techniques were combined. In total, 323 news items published during December 2020 by the sites with the highest audience in Argentina (La Nación, Clarín & Infobae) about the debate over abortion rights were analyzed. The study period includes the month in which the VIP project was approved as a legal standard. In turn, the analysis is complemented by seven in-depth interviews with members of different regions of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion. Among the results, it is observed that only 25% of the analyzed news were signed by women and that only in 28.2% of the cases the VIP law was defined as fair or necessary. In addition, 63.8% of the notes observed trivialization of the objectives or the presentation of the legal project; in 56.3%, polarization stood out, while differences were accentuated as equivalents or the actions of the counter-movement; and 83.3% showed a disregard for the importance or effectiveness of the feminist movement. At the same time, the voices of the militants allowed us to understand both the challenges and the communicational actions and strategies that they implemented to influence at the political and media level, as well as their perceptions about the way in which the media represented the issue of abortion, the slogan and objectives of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion and the image of women as part of the “green movement”.  

This article studies the contents of the most consumed information by Facebook users in Argentina, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate: 1) the issues that generated the highest level of engagement in this social media; 2) the origin of the most relevant pieces of information; and 3) the type of framing that predominated in the treatment of topics associated with the pandemic. We show, first, that COVID-19 acquired greater relevance than the other issues on Facebook, although the level of engagement of users on the subject was related to several critical events associated with the pandemic. Second, the most relevant news came from media outlets with consolidated brands, so that news consumption on the social media was concentrated. Finally, geographic proximity, conflict, human interest and explicit affective features in the posts are features of the news that explain its relevance in the social media. The study consists in analyzing the news content that achieved the highest level of engagement (likes, comments and shares) on Facebook between January 2020 and June 2021.  

The latest work by Riorda and Bentolila (2020) –entitled Anyone has a plan until they hit you in the face. Learning from a crisis– was not born in an ordinary year. It was born in a year in which everything changed as a result of a pandemic that made the whole world enter into a crisis and the idea of normality was put into discussion. It is a work gestated from the crossed analysis of the social sciences and the medical and psychiatric sciences, identifying the interpretive frameworks that allow to characterize the idea of crisis, its complexity and nature, but also to investigate the impact that it has in individuals as people and as political leaders in charge of carrying out the management of the crisis. Far from proposing a methodical plan for the “successful” management of the crisis, the work begins by reflecting on the impact of the crisis on any planning and how it obliterates the idea of control and certainty. Assuming the failure of the plan is the first step to advance in the reflection on the processes and tools that enable a resilient learning process. The work is presented as an open cartography, in which the only possible exit of the crisis is by encouraging oneself to learn from a fully human dimension and assuming the vulnerable social condition of man in his relationship with the world.

This article analyzes, based on a corpus of political and journalistic speeches that circulated between March and November 2020 in Argentina, the denominative stakes of political speech to designate the measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. The political names with which the pandemic event and the policies associated to it were designated, are objects of discourse resulting from a nominative act, which is an instituting act. Relatively stable, metadiscoursive and controversial nominal syntagmas that go beyond the media, political names inscribe historical-political events in short, medium and long term, and thus allow them to be fixed and projected on a temporal horizon. From the war discourse to the medical-scientific discourse, from metaphores of confinement to the dictatorial allusions, from quarantine to the Preventive and Compulsory Social Isolation and the Social, Preventive and Compulsory Distancing, the political discourse circulated more than one name trying to give it sense and thickness to an unprecedented collective experience.

The article addresses the conceptual discussion about the role of Internet platforms, especially in relation to content moderation. For it, the strategies that were implemented in the framework of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in Argentina and in the world, are taken as a point of departure. Special attention is paid to those linked, on the one hand, to eliminating, labeling and classifying in a descending way the misinformation, and, on the other hand, to redirect users with official health sources. The question that guides the development of this article, if any strategies can affect, in some way, the freedom of expression, especially of the minorities. The qualitative approach proposed to resort to the use of secondary sources, as well as primary sources, through semi-structured interviews with experts. Furthermore, it covers aspects relating to the regulation of platforms, the concentration in converging scenarios and the public dialogue in digital environments. As these issues are being discussed nowadays, the conclusions that are raised are intended to reflectively contribute to a broader public debate that has become fundamental in the development of current democracies.

La transformación del mercado audiovisual es uno de los temas más preponderantes en la agenda de investigaciones y estudios en el campo de la comunicación. En el caso de América Latina e Iberoamérica, estos fenómenos adquieren características que deben ser miradas con particular atención. Luis Albornoz es uno de los investigadores más experimentados en dicha área de estudios y ha sabido profundizar la mirada sobre la plataformización de las producciones, el nuevo funcionamiento económico del mercado, los efectos sobre la diversidad cultural y la necesidad de nuevas políticas públicas que corrijan asimetrías y desigualdades.

This article analyzes the last decade structure and dynamics of the Argentine cinema market, considering the transformations in distribution and consumption resulting from the dissemination of video-on-demand platforms within the convergent concentration context that cultural industries are going through. In that respect, it explores and describes the characteristics, evolution, and performance of Odeón –launched in November 2015 as a platform that provided free nationalaudio-visual content– and its continuity through Cine.ar Play –name assumed in 2017– and Cine.ar Estrenos– a paid service to watch films simultaneously with their premiere in the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts theaters. From the perspective of the Political Economy of Communication, it examines the trends in discontinuous audio-visual sector –in particular, the cinema branch– and the government actions towards it. The final part of that process, affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, allows to reflect on the impact generated by the emergence of web services which exhibit audio-visual content over the local cinema commercial circuit and to rethink the regulatory framework challenges that the new scenario presents.