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

Dr. John Brookshire Thompson, who is of North American origin but currently works at the Uni­versity of Cambridge, is a sociologist interested in understanding the role of the mass media in the de­velopment of modern society and culture. His theo­retical expositions –especially those concentrated in his book The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Polity Press, 1995)– are a constant ref­erence in the productions of European scholars who theorizing around the concept of mediatization. In the present interview, the first reflections on trans­formations in the public sphere were developed by Thompson in the mid-1990s, are revisited under the light of a media ecosystem different in part.

The book Titulares, hashtags y videojuegos (2016) is not a book. Or not only that. Compile the participations in the first congress of the Center for Studies on Media and Society (MESO, for its acronym in Spanish), a space for research and debate at the Universidad de San Andrés (UDESA), Argentina. The book consecrates the instance of creation of that space in 2015, which meant a consistent movement in the field of communication. And not because there was not a long tradition in the country of academic activities and references consecrated in the twentieth century, but because that space came to propose an opening to themes and methods of study of the XXI century.

Éric Sadin explains that the book La humanidad aumentada (2017) is part of a virtual trilogy integrated by two previous essays (Surveillance globale, 2009, and La Société de l'anticipation, 2011). But the chance of the moment of the publication of the Spanish version is articulated with the explosive irruption in the international press of a persistent theme: the deep "dangers" implicit in the increasing and incessant irruption of devices based on artificial intelligence that cross vast domains of the social and settle in the very heart of our private lives.

In the book El sentido del rumor (2017), Marc Argemí brings together two themes in vogue: social management of “hoaxes” and the analysis of social networks as a field of knowledge of social trends. Two areas that are intertwined assiduously in our daily life.

On 26 June 2000, in a spectacular press conference, the Human Genome Project, an international public consortium, and Celera Genomics, a private company founded in 1998 by the genetician Craig Venter jointly announced the nearly complete decoding of the human genome. The following year, in February 2001, the announcement was reiterated when the the results were published in the scientific journals Science and Nature. All the main media reported and commented these events.This article makes a comparative analysis of articles published in the most importantFrench daily newspapers (La Croix, Le Figaro, L’Humanité, Libération, Le Monde and Le Parisien) on the announcementsrelated to the human genome project. The metaphors mobilised around the project, the graphics, the scientific explanations as well as the analysis of the discovery’s implicationsare the focus of the analysis. Just a few newspapersrecalled that humans are not exclusively inscribed in their genes and that they are as marked by their history and their environment as by their genetic code. The old quarrel between the nature and nurture arises again: do 30000 genes really make a human being? The very meaning of DNA, the material support of a part that is transmited by each generation, differ according the newspaper and every reader. The vision of researchers and the trust they must givethe importance of the intellectual adventure or the perspectives of applications or potential risks, there are a relevant part and parcel of the different representations of the “progress” of science.The news coverage of the announcements about the Human Genome Project shows different visions about the decoding of the philosophies related to the human being. Popular newspapers are preoccupied by eugenic perspectives. Papers with strong moral references (whether L’Humanité, La Croix or Le Figaro) energetically recall the role of history and environment in the genesis of man. Others, but in particular Libération, were more inclined to see humans inscribed in their genes. In summary, we have found a large diversity among the press’s discourse, also expressing different point of views of science.In this sense, the research shows that popular newspapers have systematically taken a certain distance from the scientific world, remarking the ethical questions often raised by their work. The so called elite newspapers have shown themselves to be closer to the political and scientific institutions, quicker in showing trust in researchers, though with some nuances. All these media discourse carry traces of a society’s questions and hesitations when faced with the evolutions of life sciences that probe and shift the boundaries of humanity.

Si las narrativas transmedia cuentan con un desarrollo creciente y estable en distintas áreas (ficción, periodismo, documental), existen condiciones para atender procesos incipientes en espacios discursivos análogos, como el científico-académico. Estamos ante la posibilidad cercana de que este tipo de producciones deje de circular exclusivamente en forma de libros y papers, y que los cambios en la esfera mediática incluso lleguen a modificar ciertas lógicas del trabajo científico. Con esta premisa, se analizan las características de los saberes especializados y sus formas de transmisión. Para comprender su funcionamiento y particularidades, se revisan los mecanismos de legitimación y su vínculo con los medios de comunicación: los modos de alfabetización: tradicional, mediática y transmedia. Finalmente, se realiza un recorrido por la implementación y el progreso de los instrumentos aplicados en la comunicación científica: el documental audiovisual (tradicional, caracterizado por el relato lineal), y las rupturas, continuidades y reconfiguraciones que plantea la aparición del webdoc como nuevo género audiovisual, la interactividad y la investigación participativa.

The aim of this research is to analyze the communication training received by under-graduate students from the areas of health and life sciences, environmen tal sciences and natural sciences. For this purpose, the whole of the Spanish university system (84 universities) and a sample of 10 universities belonging to six Latin- American countries have been studied. Starting from a documentary analysis of their websites, 91 courses were identified that gather the inclusion criteria: 48 in the medical degree, 18 in life sciences (biomedicine and biotechnology, mainly), 13 in environmental sciences and other natural sciences and 12 in other health sciences (such as psychology, nursing, nutrition pharmacy, gerontology, neuroscience or veterinary science). As well, a content analysis of the teaching programs of these courses has identified seven main thematic categories. These seven categories are: 1) theories of communication and communication-based interventions; 2) communication in action: actors, interpersonal relationships and communication environments; 3) nature of science and specific elements of the disciplinary field; 4) communication in mass media and its social impact; 5) ethical aspects of communication; 6) general communication skills and techniques; and 7) special situations skills.

This study aims to know what is the perception that researchers of Spanish universities have about the impact they generated on their careers, the scientific news published with the results of their Research, Development and Innovation (R+D+I) activities. To this end, data was collected by an online survey conducted in 2016 of 602 researchers of scientific communication from 20 universities in Spain. The only requirement was that any of their publications had been subject to –at least- a press release issued by their own university in the last five years, before the survey launched (2016). For the analysis of the data, the test of the significant difference among variables (Ztest) and the Kruskal-Wallis independence test, had been used. According to the results, the researchers trust more in the journalists of their institution rather than those of other media. In addition, they perceive that the dissemination of their scientific articles gives them more benefits than damages. However, these results also encourage to considering all current the challenges in the field of professionalization and scientific dissemination.

The communication of science in museums responds to communication models, either implicitly or explicitly, that assign certain roles to visitors and curators, that entail a position and an understanding about the knowledge status being constructed in the museum space. The process of development of the exhibition Walking around Bariloche in 1917: a tour that join together fragments, stories and institutions, was created in 2017 at the Museum de la Patagonia (city of Bariloche, Rio Negro Province, Argentina). The exhibition confronted us to the challenge of revealing the way in which urban historical Archaeology works. To this purpose, was designed an approach that interpellates the visitors through diverse museographic resources, with few objects and an emphasis in interpretative charts. We adhere to the idea of a model of museum, which enables an active search for sharing power with the community understanding the “museological” phenomenon as a production of meanings through the ordering, conjugation and structuring of the elements of the proposed exhibition.

In this article, the main problems related to the dissemination of history in film and television are approached from a semiotic perspective. The behavior of scientific language involves processes, systems and structures, which have been developed in a specifically manner in film and television. The structure of the organization of messages with informative function in the field of history shows behaviors and problems common of the audiovisual communication used in a narrative process. Some of these problems are specialized language, fiction, plausibility, cognitive schemes and explanatory effect. A semiotic approach allows us to reflect on the behavior and its possible future developments in other audiovisual systems; virtual reality, video game and hyperreality.