CIC. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación
CIC. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación (ISSN 1135-7991, ISSN-e 1988-4001), an annual journal, is a publishing international project of the Department of Journalism and New Media and its divisions of Information Theory, Semiotics of Mass Communication and World's Structure of Information, at the Faculty of Information Sciences in Complutense University in Madrid, Spain. It aims to present the latest and most relevant global contributions in this field of knowledge to experts and the research community. Its contents include unpublished, cutting-edge research texts on world's communication and information, both recent and classic topics, as well as book reviews and translations. Its international focus can be seen in the number of contributions, subjects and authors from communication and information international research field.
In order to support the global exchange of knowledge, the journal CIC. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación is allowing unrestricted access to its content as from its publication in this electronic edition, and as such it is an open-access journal. The originals published in this journal are the property of the Complutense University of Madrid and any reproduction thereof in full or in part must cite the source. All content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 use and distribution licence (CC BY 4.0). This circumstance must be expressly stated in these terms where necessary. You can view the summary and the complete legal text of the licence.
Memes and Politics: Sociosemiotic Analysis of the 2020 Constitutional Plebiscite in Chile
In 2020, in Chile, a plebiscite was held at the national level to decide whether citizens agreed or not to change the Constitution. For this, two voting options were considered: Approve or Reject. This article analyzed, in particular, how internet memes sought to influence public scrutiny of citizens, examining narrative and rhetorical aspects, as a visual verb component that contains a significant semi-historical mediation. We reflect on the enunciative and ideological constructions transmitted by both positions, widely differentiated according to the traditions they evoked: for the rejection, retain their political project and associate the other proposal as harmful to the country; and, to approve a contrast to the sustained neoliberal system.
Copyright (c) 2025 CIC. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación
Outlook for the EU audiovisual sector: between public service resilience in the face of technological giants and institutional resistance in defence of rights and democracy
In the media scenario of the European Union there are at least two remarkable challenges ahead: firstly, the resilience power of the large public audiovisual corporations and, secondly, strengthening press freedom and information as a public service when fake news or manipulated content are spread and, consequently, threaten the rule of law. The challenge that EU must face in this field is evident in the Report on the application of the Audiovisual Communication Services Directive issued by the Culture and Education Committee of the European Parliament on April 12, 2023. With this contribution we intend, not only to delve into this context, but also, to explain the terms with which the EU has responded to events since it implemented the Digital Single Market Strategy (DSM, 2015).
Recontextualizing the notion of “cultural industry”: Critical analysis of its reception in communication training manuals
In order to recontextualize and elevate the concept of "cultural industry" as articulated by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article examines this notion, focusing on its treatment and reception in various teaching manuals on communication theory and research. The concept of "cultural industry" is frequently extracted from its original context in Dialectic of Enlightenment, leading to a simplified critique of mass culture that strips this concept of its complexity and critical dimension. This paper emphasizes the need to place the concept of “cultural industry” in its original framework in order to properly understand the meaning given to it by Horkheimer and Adorno. It is highlighted that, despite technological and social changes over the years, the concerns raised by the authors—more focused on the aims, principles, and methods of mass communication than on its effects—remain relevant for analyzing the role of the cultural industry in contemporary society.
Generational Differences in News Consumption during Election Campaigns: the Spanish Case of June 2023
This article analyzes generational differences in news consumption during electoral campaigns in Spain, using the June 2023 campaign as a case study. Based on a representative survey of 1,014 adults, the study examines the willingness of different age groups to modify or expand their information sources. Findings show that 77.7% of respondents did not change their usual news consumption habits during the campaign. However, the 18–24 age group displayed a greater openness to incorporating new sources, particularly digital newspapers and social media accounts of parties and candidates, in contrast with individuals over 65, who maintained more stable information routines.
Open-World Art: searching for customisation of artistic experiences in the boundaries between videogames and media art
Current trends in audiovisual contents look at customising the user experience by adapting media to consumers’ choices and preferences. Immersive media art has absorbed some of the elements of ‘engagement’, but it does not seem to have reached the level of individualisation of experience that digital games have achieved. To define the difference between open-world games and immersive performing art, an analysis of immersive artworks is performed based on Calleja’s Player Involvement Model. As a result, the concept of open-world art is proposed to connect open-world game features and immersive art, to build a novel artistic construction that creates actual personal experiences for participants.
Expressivist Semantics and Statatactivism in the Media Construction of Workplace Accidents: A Proposal for Analysis Based on Critical Exoinmanentism and the Political Sociology of Quantification
Two key strategies employed to ensure the persuasiveness of journalistic discourse are the selection of sources that appeal to emotions and the use of statistical data. This study examines a corpus of news reports on workplace accidents through an analytical framework that integrates the concept of critical exoimmanence (Gonzalo Abril) and the political sociology of systematized quantification (Alan Desrosières). The analysis enables a mapping of journalistic production concerning the argumentative strategies devised by social agents and political actors. Furthermore, the study explores the self-referential and hetero-referential functions of emotional discourse. These semiotic forms and practices contributed to the normalization of workplace accidents.
Towards a Critical Epistemology Grounded in Territory
This article proposes a critical epistemology grounded in territory as a response to the depoliticization of academic knowledge and the dominance of instrumental reason. Drawing on the foundations of Critical Theory —the unity of theory and praxis, materialist dialectics, and immanent critique— and engaging with intersectional perspectives and situated epistemologies, the need is posed to rethink the links between knowledge, power, and space. The article identifies six key dimensions for a territorialized epistemology: the recognition of contextual specificity, the transformation of social structures, the intersectionality of struggles, the participatory production of knowledge, resistance to the commodification of culture, and the questioning of global epistemic hegemony.
Emotions and territorial senses. A socio-semiotical perspective
Emotions always affect meaning, its production and interpretation. But it is also true that meaning is always part of the emotional process. Starting from this double assumption, the article discusses the conceptions of the subject, the body and the emotion that would allow to advance in the thinking about this field of questions. And it focuses on territorial emotions, the emotions of being part of the world, to observe how we appropriate - or become attached to - places, people, objects, expressions, values, to turn them into territories or seats, more lasting or more fleeting, of our point of view, in that which provides us with a place in the world.
Can Networks Form Spheres? Habermas, the Digital Turn, and the Metaphorical Limits of Public Opinion
Digital platforms and their algorithms have reignited the debate over how we conceptualize the structure and dynamics of public opinion. This article compares two central metaphors—the “sphere” and the “network”—to assess their ability to diagnose contemporary communication processes. Drawing on four features of Habermas’s public sphere (location, symmetry, openness, and anchoring), we show that the spherical image still offers a decisive benchmark for judging deliberative quality. The network, by contrast, provides a key descriptive power for mapping digital flows and revealing algorithmic asymmetries, yet this metaphor lacks its own normative guidelines. We conclude that recovering the spatial dimensions of the public sphere supplies a uniquely valuable critical framework for efforts aimed at exploring normative principles of democratic public opinion.
Empathy and lack of Empathy in the press in Activism and Social Diversity
This research focuses on the mobilizations, demands and news related to three very different human groups (deaf people, gypsies and indignant youth) to observe whether an empathetic attitude of journalists or the media towards the activism of these groups improves the quality of information. With a broad temporal perspective, we analyze the treatment of the press in three foci: the historical mobilizations in 1988 and 2006 of deaf students at Gallaudet University in Washington; the movement of the indignados in Spain on May 15, 2011 in favor of a more participatory democracy, and finally we observe a selection of events related to roman people (gypsies) in Czech Republic, Italy, France and Spain , the las 30 years until 2018.
Difussion of political content in tiktok and the young voters’ capture
This work aims to show internet users' responses to different posts and the types of distortions and emotions that drive each of these responses, through a two-month sociological experiment on two TikTok accounts, one conservative and the other progressive. It also aims to understand what types of cognitive communities have formed, or were already formed, based on this experiment, and what patterns each of these groups respond to.
This article, presented as a theoretical essay, aims to reflect, based on the proposals of the Spanish philosopher and semiologist Gonzalo Abril Curto, particularly his studies on information as a cultural formation, on the status of two fundamental concepts for thinking about the social: information and fragmentation. I add to this reflection the concept of velocity, as part of a work that seeks to recognize and critically consider the coordinates traversing society as a whole. To develop this work, we draw on examples from the cultural, media, and everyday life fields to show the changes that have occurred in various spheres of social life since the advent of digital life.
Bernárdez Rodal, Asunción. Forjadoras de utopías. Seis escritoras españolas entre dos siglos (XIX-XX). Rosario de Acuña, Sofía Casanova, Carmen de Burgos, Clara Campoamor, María Enciso y Concha Castroviejo), Valencia, Tirant Humanidades, 2025.
Abril, Gonzalo. La belleza del vagar. Eolas Ediciones, 2022. ISBN: 9788419453327, 140 pp.
Aladro Vico, Eva. El Yo que se comunica. La identidad en la comunicación. Tirant Lo Blanch, 2025.ISBN 978-84-1081-258-1. 260 pp.
This text reflects on the intrinsically social value of poetic creation. The creative use of language, for the author, is the formative nucleus of human society and its exhibition as a collective achievement. In poetry it is possible to see the deep forces of shared language at work, that lead to a better world, thanks to the capacity of poetry to arouse a “nostalgia for the future”. The author reviews great poems written around the Spanish War and demonstrates this thesis, while illustrating it with great beauty and certainty.
Bayón, Eduardo (2024). Lucha de tribus. Mitos y verdades de la batalla política y la radicalización identitaria entre la izquierda y la derecha. España: Editorial La Esfera de los Libros, 279 pp. ISBN: 9788413849157
Simplification and distortion in Israeli propaganda. Edward Bernays advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu
The following research aims to analyze how Benjamin Netanyahu has employed the two political propaganda techniques that Edward Bernays considered necessary to shape public opinion, namely simplification and distortion, following the Hamas attacks on Israeli soil on October 7th. To this end, a minimal quantitative methodology has been employed through the online platform Fanpage Karma, as well as a qualitative methodology through Critical Discourse Analysis on a sample of 12 interventions by Netanyahu between October 7 and November 24. The results demonstrate that the political propaganda of the Israeli government is based on three discursive axes: 1) the political instrumentalization of the collective trauma of the Jewish people; 2) a theological rhetoric justifying military actions; and 3) linking the Islamist group Hamas to Nazism and ISIS.
Copyright (c) 2024 CIC. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación
Environmentalism, bucolism and dissidence. Ecodystopian iconologies in the film production of the 70s
Throughout the 1960s, society began to become aware of the effects of pollution and the depletion of the planet's resources, leading to the emergence of the environmental movement. Theenvironmental demands were taken up by the film industry, heavily influenced by counter-cultural thinking, and constituted an extension of the scientific and academic debate. Thefilm productions told the story of the generational rejection of urban society and its technological derivations, establishing a new environmental imaginary through ecodystopian proposals. This article delves into the films No Blade of Grass (Wilde, 1970) and Silent Running (Trumbull, 1972) as representative case studies of the cultural positions adopted confronting, through urban dissidence and bucolic artificial bucolism, the end of the urban.
Urbanity and stigma: the relevance of LGBT+ territories in the state of Jalisco, Mexico
The relevance of LGBT+ territories has been little recognized within research that addresses gender-based dissidence in Mexico. Therefore, this work seeks to analyze the relevance of space for LGBT+ people in the context of daily life. Thus, a theoretical framework is built that articulates Goffman's conceptual proposal of representation with the contributions of the Geography of Sexualities, to show that the construction of LGBT+ territories responds to a sociocultural and another contextual dimension. The study focuses on the state of Jalisco, Mexico based on complaints made on the digital platform of the AMICUS organization, highlighting elements of the aggression, the victim and the aggressor. The results show that LGBT+ territories are the result of both the appropriation of space and a response to the manifestations of heterosexism.
Education, communication and humanism in the journalism of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This paper explores the educational and communicative values found in the journalistic production of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Values that are little known in communication and which in education have been erroneously reduced to the child environment. In both cases these values have their origin in the humanist thought of the author. It´s a personal conception that the writer reflected in his journalism and developed in his literature, especially in Le Petit Prince, a book that is an educational literary reference. This paper has been carried out with a qualitative methodology and based on the journalistic stories that Saint-Exupéry published in the French press. This article has a historical perspective, for the object of study, as well as current, since it investigates issues of interest at present from an interdisciplinary approach.
The Right to the City, «chronicle of a death announced». Digitalization or crisis of the Urban
In a world that is approaching 8 billion people, in which cities and with them the urban way of life have gone from being a hypothesis to a reality and where cities are constituting the spearhead of economic and social development world, paradoxically, cities are blurring, becoming large diffuse aggregates, most of them with serious management difficulties, whose reason for being and nature is lost, despite the continuous appeal by urban operators of the need to find appropriate forms of political management. All cities, but mainly large cities, constitute a Janus mirror; on the one hand, they are centers of innovation and wealth; On the other hand, they present increasingly pronounced levels of inequality. From the 90s onwards, cities have varied their urban strategy. From the city of dominant production in the last century, exponent of a productive economy, we have moved to the city of consumption. The first was a source of wealth, it was concerned with the problem of the location of productive activities, the second is an object of value, faced with the threat of relocation that shakes most cities, it has thrown itself into the arms of the consumer society and has attempted to monetarily value all available resources: landscape, culture, leisure, sport..., all at the service of a public future that gives value to the goods appreciated by an economy linked to consumption benefiting from changes in mobility patterns. The digital city represents the latest addition in this process of change. The smart city emerges as a paradigm to imitate that, taking advantage of the impact of new technologies linked to the digital world, is presented as a technotopia capable of solving the serious problems that current cities face. Technology as an objective expression of scientific reason will be able to shed light on today's serious challenges. You simply must let it act
Urban image and photojournalism. An aesthetic review of deindustrialization
This work addressed how photojournalism has captured and exposed the processes of deindustrialization and depopulation, transforming the perception of the coal basins of the northern peninsula. Through aesthetic studies and visual semiotics, the work of eight photojournalists who documented the region's transition towards landscapes marked by abandonment and ruin was reviewed. The results obtained evidenced how images of this nature generated changes in urban imaginaries, fostering dialectics of decline and nostalgia, but also of resistance and reflection. This work highlights the role of photojournalism in the construction of visual discourses on regional identity and urban transformation in the contemporary era.
Misogyny, toxic behaviors, and ideological convergences within video games and their communities: An interview with Marta Trivi, a cultural journalist specialized in video games
*anonimizado*, a cultural journalist specializing in video games, posits that the communities emerging around video games since the late 1980s have served as precursors to the disinformation tactics long employed by the extreme right, coinciding notably with the advent of Trumpism. Against this backdrop, she elucidates a nexus between these communities—viewed as crucibles of marketing and social manipulation—and contemporary manifestations of violence and misogyny. The ensuing discourse illuminates these interconnections. Rooted in an interview conducted on September 25, 2023, and the subsequent dialogues, Marta asserts, among other insights, the existence of direct linkages between gamer communities and the ethos of Trump.
Exploring Athletic Club de Bilbao's Communication: Philosophy, Identity, and Fan´s Community
Professional football teams operate today in a globalized context where communication strategies are crucial for strengthening bonds with their fanbases. The aim of this research was to explore the communication tactics of a football team by analyzing 15 documentary videos from the official YouTube channel of Athletic Club de Bilbao, a football team with a recruitment policy that is unique in the world of football and often labelled as anachronistic. Through a qualitative methodology, thematic analysis, and using Atlas.ti software, the results revealed that the football club's communication tactics involve presenting a contemporary narrative in their documentary videos that embraces the linguistic and cultural diversity of Basque society, blending localism with cosmopolitanism. These findings suggest that the fans of Athletic Club experience a sense of distinction and exclusivity compared to other teams and supporters worldwide, transcending the geographical boundaries of their city.
The production of space in La sociedad del semáforo. Sociological analysis from the soundscape
This article focuses on the urban space from a cinematographic reading, considering cinema as an aesthetic materialization that denotes the author's reading as a city dweller, a participant in the changing life and interaction of the produced space. With approaches from urban sociology, the film La Sociedad del Semáforo is taken as a starting point for understanding the daily life of the inhabitants of the streets of Bogotá, as protagonists of the film, who converge in the urban space. Methodologically, a visual and sound analysis of the content is developed, with greater emphasis on the second element, and having as the main reference Henry Lefebvre, whose conceptual triad contributed to the exploration of the production of space in the film, mainly from the use of artifacts and silence as an ironic form of marginality and deviation.
Paisajes urbanos en la era de la comunicación (acerca de la comunicación urbana)
Public opinion, town planning and citizen participation
The consolidation of public opinion as an extra-institutional sphere endowed with political functions and legitimacy and the growing complexity and scale of cities motivate reflection on the role of the press and other media in the area of urban policy. The proposal may seem obvious, but it has not received adequate academic or political attention. We then proposed an analysis on the participation of media actors in the urban environment, in particular in the development of participatory urbanism. The press becomes a control mechanism for planning and as a foundation for civic education, therefore, as a fundamental vector of urban environment, beyond their work as sources of information, democratic surveillance and co-producers of a media genius loci.
Mitocrítica cultural. Una definición del mito. José Manuel Losada Goya. Akal, 2022