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

In the second half of the XIX century several events rushed the downfall of the "illustrated" public space transforming "the public" into consumers.With the lack of strong ideologies and the founding of reading codes centered in aesthetic aspects, the political institutions have decided, nowadays, to specialize in mass media. Thus, a different way of making politics suddenly rises up where the leading role is played by a new public space: the television.  We are, then, before a process of "personalization" and "aesthetification" of politics because, instead of an ideology, we are offered aesthetically attractive characters. In this fashion, politics, in its argumentative terms, is dissolved, and elements like private life and charisma acquire an unusual role in the making of the public images of the political candidates.Television has installed itself as a fundamental ingredient of the political scenario, rearranging it according to the show business style. Not only the way in which politics is transmitted changes but also the way in which it is practiced. The challenge for the theory of communication rests, then, in investigating the potentialities of this new context in such a way as to build a more democratic society.

Discourse modelization shows speaker'sattitudes about his statements or his audiences through many strategies, such as intonation or axiological words using.In this paper, we introduce the notion oftopical modalization, understood as the evocation, in discourse, of ordinary or extraordinary universes. From our pointof view, this modalization contributes to form a neutral or intensified image of speaker himself.To demonstrate this, we applied this notion to EvaPeron's speeches for Labor Day in four consecutive years. And wefound that, complementary with other support strategies, topical modalizationmade up the image of a emphatic, passionate and extreme speaker.

During the 1999 Chilean Presidential Election, the political discourse of Joaquin Lavín, right-wing candidate and UDI party activist, was characterized by an extreme simplification of content and the construction of a narrative using information implicitly.   This discourse separates the image of a Pinochet submissive to public judgment from the authoritarian legacy of his regimen and, among other things, was characterized by the permanent criticism of the political parties.

This article tries to show the way how the media articulates under a biopolitics power regime, taken the troubled relation life-communication-politics as a point of reference. It is convienent to remember body intervention as power issue and the important body mutation in the technological development. New communication technologies and information represent an antropologic transformation and new significance regimens. Where power perception does not seem to appear already located in a place where it irradiates, but dispersed and transversal, which is effective in daily as a place.

This paper offers the results of an investigation about uses and consumption of TV news by teenagers in Santiago, Chile. The study tends to acquire teenagers' perceptions about how media represent them, focusing on deep interviews to male and female youngs and by describing their consumption contexts.