CIC. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación

Poesía y comunismo

Alain Badiou — 2025-09-15

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.

Recontextualizing the notion of “cultural industry”: Critical analysis of its reception in communication training manuals

Francisco Bernete García — 2025-09-15

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.

Towards a Critical Epistemology Grounded in Territory

Ángel Carrasco Campos — 2025-09-15

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.

Can Networks Form Spheres? Habermas, the Digital Turn, and the Metaphorical Limits of Public Opinion

Andrés Shoai — 2025-09-15

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.

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

Carlos Rodríguez Crespo — 2025-09-15

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.

Fragment, speed, information

Luis Nitrihual Valdebenito — 2025-09-15

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.

Memes and Politics: Sociosemiotic Analysis of the 2020 Constitutional Plebiscite in Chile

Francisco Olivares-Cortés — 2025-09-15

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.

Emotions and territorial senses. A socio-semiotical perspective

Cristina Peñamarín — 2025-09-15

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.

Presentación

Israel V. Márquez — 2025-09-15

Generational Differences in News Consumption during Election Campaigns: the Spanish Case of June 2023

Alejandro Costa Escuredo — 2025-09-15

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.

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

Elena Real Rodríguez — 2025-09-15

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).

Open-World Art: searching for customisation of artistic experiences in the boundaries between videogames and media art

Manuel Mari-Altozano — 2025-09-15

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.

Difussion of political content in tiktok and the young voters’ capture

Andrés Suárez López — 2025-09-15

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.

Empathy and lack of Empathy in the press in Activism and Social Diversity

Jordi Serrat — 2025-09-15

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.

Abril, Gonzalo. La belleza del vagar. Eolas Ediciones, 2022. ISBN: 9788419453327, 140 pp.

Equipo CIC — 2025-09-15

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.

Flavia Blanco — 2025-09-15

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.

Iara Rossetti Musso Rossetti Musso — 2025-09-15

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

David del Pino Díaz — 2025-09-15