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

The COVID-19 pandemic radically changed people’s lives and the state of affairs in all spheres of life and transformed environmental ideas, social problems at the micro and macroeconomic levels, and the market mechanism to maintain economic justice. The pandemic consequences have exacerbated individualism, intersectionality, diversity, and inclusiveness issues. Disproportionate risks and worsened outlooks have been observed for socially and economically vulnerable groups. The present cross-cultural study discusses the content of social media on the COVID-19 perception by Spanish, German, and Russian-speaking actors, applying a multimodal approach and using neural network technologies and text analyses. The data analysis made it possible to identify common and distinctive features of communicative actors’ perception of various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the identity of explicitly expressed issues, the implicit information for the three types of users was significantly different, reflected in the dissimilar course and evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, shedding light on their cultural and political reasons.

This document intends to analyze the sentiments underlying COVID-19 vaccination tweets. To achieve the objective, 38,034 publications from this social network are extracted through data mining, applying Machine Learning techniques, specifically sentiment analysis and network analysis, to identify the feelings expressed by Twitter users. We also identify the most relevant Twitter accounts on vaccination issues. The results suggest that feelings about vaccines are primarily negative; fear and anger, respectively, are the most recurring emotions in Twitter opinions. Moreover, we noted that the most relevant accounts belong to the media, politicians, and influencers, classified according to their feelings toward the vaccine. Opposition to the government with feelings of anger and opposition to recognized media with joyful emotions stand out.

Scholars from different fields of knowledge agree that storytelling has gained particular relevance in the current context, as noted in Corporate Communication. The term “corporate storytelling” has already been coined to refer to the stories that companies tell their stakeholders. We have found several studies that try to shed light on the nature, scope, and limitations of storytelling in the corporate world from different approaches and methods. This research presents a critical review of this literature. It highlights that the absence of conceptual unity and methodological approaches validated by the scientific community has made storytelling a topic about which much has been written without offering articulated knowledge or practical solutions for its application to develop a company’s communication strategy.

Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge of the century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has clarified that a half-a-degree Celsius warmer Earth will mean the difference between life and death. Against this backdrop, communication on climate change is of paramount importance to make individual and government commitments to combat this problem, accentuated above all by the action of human activities. This research aims to delve into emotional psychology and environmental communication to explain the popularity of climate change content on YouTube. Using videos that address environmental issues, the authors examine how emotions that produce physiological arousal result in mass diffusion. The results indicate that, regardless of the valence of videos (i.e., whether considered positive or negative), they can become popular to the extent that they promote viewers’ physiological arousal. This finding sheds light on why people share environmental content and how to design campaigns to fight climate change.

McLuhan cites Ortega y Gasset’s works, including History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History and Man and People, in two passages from War and Peace in the Global Village, six years after publishing The Gutenberg Galaxy and four years after Understanding Media. These readings coincide with the abandonment of the expression “galaxy,” which he replaced with “environment.” Based on these findings, we have examined McLuhan’s citations of Ortega and their relation to the replacement of “galaxy” for “environment” for the first time. Using a method of direct collation of the Ortega’s works that McLuhan read in English with the original texts written by Ortega, this study aims to show a relationship between the use of the term “environment” by McLuhan and Ortega’s concept of “circumstance,” which has gone unnoticed by specialists. McLuhan tacitly endorsed some of the main ideas of Orteguian philosophy.

Review of book: Guarinos, V. (coord.) (2021). La isla etaria: tercera edad y medios de comunicación. Sevilla: ReaDuck Ediciones.

COVID-19 has been changing politics, especially during election periods when the search for votes intensifies. The influenza pandemic of 1918 (misnamed Spanish flu) not only had impacted the development of electoral campaigns but also forever changed the pillars of political communication. This article seeks to analyze the trends in the first election campaigns held during COVID-19 that could, as happened in 1918, constitute a new stage of digital political communication. The elections to the Galician Parliament in 2020 are discussed. Methodological triangulation is used with the following data extraction and analysis techniques: 1) systematic literature review; 2) content analysis of websites and digital resources used by the parties in social networks; 3) interviews with journalists who covered the campaign in radio, press, television, news agencies, and digital media. Twitter was also monitored because it has become one of the main means of political communication during electoral campaigns. The results show an intense search for citizen presence and engagement through new message control strategies.

The amount of time spent on Instagram by young people in India has grown exponentially. This social media platform is a sea of visuals that reflect the activities people are engaging in. The constant viewing of other people’s lives can lead to a feeling of dissatisfaction about one’s own life. The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) emerges when an individual who is unable to participate in or engage with the activities of others, experiences feelings of loneliness and isolation. This study aims to examine the association between the time spent on Instagram and its effect on FoMO and Loneliness. The study sample consisted of 401 participants, primarily 18–24 years old, collected via convenience sampling methods. The single item Fear of Missing Out short form (FoMOsf) and the three-item Loneliness scale were administered to participants to measure FoMO and loneliness, respectively. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. A one-way analysis of variance was computed between the time one spends on Instagram and the variables of FoMO and loneliness. The analysis uncovered a statistically significant difference between the increasing amount of time spent on Instagram, that is, less than one hour, 1–2 hours, and three or more hours for FoMO [F (2,398) = 17.92, p < 0.05] and loneliness [F (2,398) = 3.57, p ≤ 0.029]. Therefore, more time spent on Instagram results in individuals experiencing significantly greater levels of FoMO and loneliness.

Inequalities ideologically based on the biological concept of gender, determined by socio-patriarchal heritage, have historically governed human thought. Cuba does not escape this reality and continues to reproduce sexist stereotypes in the construction of gender in its media. From a qualitative perspective, this research analyzes the gender assignments during  2019 in the commercial advertising discourse of the Cubavisión Internacional channel (CVI), the only institutional audiovisual medium in Cuba conceived for an international audience. The multimodal discourse analysis is used as a method, and the interview with broadcasters of the channel and gender and television advertising experts as a technique. The analysis shows that, in CVI’s advertising discourse, stereotypes are the basis for constructing gender; for this reason, the marked difference between feminine and masculine paradigms and the omission of other generics with traditional precepts are made explicit. These presuppositions affect the shaping of a folklore identity that associates Cuba and its citizens with a heteronormative tourist destination, proving the permanence of conservative advertising discourse.

The changes produced in the audiovisual industry, especially in Europe and Spain, due to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis are analyzed with a particular focus on film and television content production. To achieve this goal, a review of the existing literature on audiovisual communication during the health crisis is combined with interviews with professionals with different roles within companies in the industry. The main consequences of this research reveal a change in audiovisual work production, distribution, and exhibition models. These advances have been observed in recent years due, among other causes, to the growth of streaming services and the audience crisis. Considering the above, issues such as versatility in the operating windows, the emergence of workers in charge of ensuring health safety during the filming, and the expansion of fictional content are some aspects examined in the text. In the end, we find that the health crisis has accelerated the transformation processes regarding distribution and exhibition, enabling hybrid solutions and allowing production to undergo very few changes except those strictly related to health, which will disappear over time.