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

If social networking services have transformed the public space, they have not done it by messing and fragmenting. In fact, those features already characterized the functioning of the public before Facebook and Twitter came to reconfigured public sociality and the practices of political socialization, such as media outlet consumption. This article intends to reflect on this tension between what remains and what is modified in the contemporary public space from the consolidation of digital platforms. For that, it raises two dimensions of analysis (the ontological and the sociological) and contrasts certain current characterizations with some prominent features of public space already described before the era of technologically codified sociability.

This work explores the theoretical development of the virtual public sphere (EPV, as per its Spanish acronym). To respond to it, the article focuses mainly on: the genesis of the public sphere, the publications in social networks and the biographical suture, the double status of the public sphere, the tension between value in use and value in exchange, the virtual aspects of the EPV, and a brief appendix on trolls and post-truth. The EPV is an approach to interactions on the web that was developed within the framework of a PhD thesis, to study the demonstrations against the open-air mega-mining project promoted by the government of the province of La Rioja and the company Canadian Osisko Mining Corporation. This research uses the case study “Do not touch The Famatina” to review the construction of EPV.

This work explores the theoretical development of the virtual public sphere (EPV, as per its Spanish acronym). To respond to it, the article focuses mainly on: the genesis of the public sphere, the publications in social networks and the biographical suture, the double status of the public sphere, the tension between value in use and value in exchange, the virtual aspects of the EPV, and a brief appendix on trolls and post-truth. The EPV is an approach to interactions on the web that was developed within the framework of a PhD thesis, to study the demonstrations against the open-air mega-mining project promoted by the government of the province of La Rioja and the company Canadian Osisko Mining Corporation. This research uses the case study “Do not touch The Famatina” to review the construction of EPV.

In this paper we propose to discuss the destination and counterdestination in the political discourse of Mauricio Macri and Daniel Scioli during the presidential runoff period of the year 2015, in the Argentinian Republic. Our discursive object is formed from the posts made by both candidates in their official pages of the social network Facebook. To carry out our qualitative analysis we use interpretative tools booth the post-marxist focus of discourse that Laclau and Mouffe (2008, 2007, 2005, 2002, 1996, 1993, 1985) and the enunciative polyphony of García Negroni (2016, 1988). This study raises as a result the emergence of a new mode of counterdestination in the political discourse.

The new edition of InMediaciones de la Comunicación continues to present us with challenges.

The mass media and those with an Internet base consti­tute the space of contemporary politics. The objective of this work is to investigate the production of meaning and circulation of the conflict between Mauricio Macri and Marcelo Tinelli in 2016. This dispute, which reached so­cial networks under the hashtag #TinelliMercenarioK and reached the Argentine mass media, during the first year of the government of Macri, which generated discursive productions of unknown Internet users and public users, it is part of a new type of society: the hypermedia contem­porary (Carlón, 2015). In this mediatized process of media­tization, political enunciators have been added and, at the same time, new types of political discourse and new digital political practices have been generated. For this investiga­tion we took into account both the discursive productions of the argentine President and the television conductor in social networks and in the mass media; as well as those of unknown Internet users, journalists and the mass media. We built on the theory of the mediatization of politics of Verón (1984), we used methodology of socio-semiotic analysis (Steimberg, 1993, Verón, 1987a) and tools of hy­permedia circulation device (Carlón, 2015). We conclude in the existence of trolls and bots that support the President and attack the TV presenter and kirchnerism, as well as relieve the emergence of a macrist political collective, made up of citizen Internet followers of Macri, which is articu­lated on Twitter through a hashtag and that dissolves after the meeting between the president and Tinelli in Olivos. 

This paper is a reflexion of the implications in the social life of algorithmic systems that make up the different digital platforms for access and participate take part of the web. The concept of filter bubbles provided by Eli Pariser in his TED conference in 2011 is the starting point. This is subjected to a critical reading with the intention of making explicit its most powerful edges, that is, those that open the way to a vast field of research on our current media ecology in which little has been ventured from the Hispanic American academic discourses.After a condensed pointing out the key points that make up the posing of filter bubbles, it leads to a brief genealogy of “cookies”. That is, the technological development that offered the essential digital mnemic traces for the opening towards personalization of the contents on the web.In the critical stage of work it is put in crisis the metaphor of the bubble and its heuristic capacity to apprehend in its complexity the impact of machinic selection criteria in our lifestyles that, today might say, they are technological lifestyles (Lash, 2004). Instead, he proposes the concept of algorithmic Phenomenology, concluding on the need for a dialogical and/or metacommunicative relationship between users and algorithmic systems on which they experience the world. Finally presents the results of an empirical experiment of a limited nature in which it explores on the one hand, the truth of the hypothesis that presents Google as a platform that bubbles (isolates informatively) its users, and DuckDuckGo as a generic search engine. As well as the degree of knowledge possessed by users of some configuration options offered by the search engines and how much they are willing to intervene them.

Though the idea of horizontal networked, bottom-up communication processes is present in many discussions of the role of digital media in the context of social movements, not many studies point to the processes behind the creation and publication of authorial testimonial content by regular people, that is, content produced in situ at the heat of the moment whose author is neither media nor political actors. Through 10 interviews structured according to Proulx and colleagues’ ICT social appropriation framework (2017), with users that have created and published such type of content on Twitter with the hashtag #ForaTemer in the aftermath of Rousseff’s impeachment in Brazil in 2016.This paper discusses why and how ordinary people take media matters in their own hands as a form of political action, even though it may apparently be dressed up with different communicative functions, such as emulating the pretense neutrality and objectivity of media discourse. Findings point to a convergent media critique as main motivator, followed by the aim to connect the absent and to scrutinize police abuse. The aggregated result seems to point to a manifestation of collective intelligence, characterized by swarm-like logics and alienation from the complete result of the #ForaTemer publications.Research funded by CONICYT-PCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2016-21160426.

Recently, the Internet has become a platform for online interaction processes that has expanded the possibility of participation to non-expert users. In this context, insecurity, as an issue, has become in a common theme for its dissemination and debate through virtual spaces. In this article we propose to investigate the practices in social networking services exercised by publics that are shaped around insecurity in Argentina during the last decade, paying particular attention to the practices of those relatives of victims of crime. With this objective we investigate different experiences: firstly, we analyze practices and emerging contents of three spaces in social networking services linked to cases of insecurity. Secondly, we conducted in-depth interviews with administrators from different pages (or fanpages) and Facebook open groups linked to the experience of victimization and insecurity. Finally, we participate in collective street actions linked to the organization and demand of these virtual groups, particularly a march for security. The work focuses on the dynamics of the processes that converge in these experiences and the practices of the actors that give them entity. We perform a qualitative analysis.

In this article, we analyze the relationship between traditional media, social networks and agenda setting. The agenda-melding model is consistent with the creation of information bubbles, although it fails to explain how an agenda takes form when users can actively publish and disseminate content that is of interests to them. Our model investigates the decision of users to promote and propagate content that is cognitively congruent with their preferences. We measure the propensity of virtual users to propagate content consistent with their political beliefs, the propensity to propagate links to traditional and non-traditional media, and the time to retweet a message (latency) based on links to traditional media included in those posts. The findings indicate that the messages spread with different speed in the network, depending on the congruence or cognitive dissonance between users and of these for the messages published. Results show that communities of users that meld a collective agenda can limit the capacity of the traditional media to set the public agenda.