Government communication: reflections about an object

Abstract

The aim of this work is to describe, from a socio-semiotic perspective, the origin and transformations of one of the main government’s recourses to relate with its public: the press advertisement. Under this genre, we gather a group of texts which, with the goal of being informative, were produced by governmental institutions in different periods of time, from the consolidation of independent, commercial, professional and massive press in Argentina, at the beginning of the XX century to current time, focusing on the communication of the government of the City of Buenos Aires. Placed on system, government’s advertisements might be read as a self-referenced narration about the state institutions; as a reservoir of a wide set of topics regarding the public sphere; and as a communication regime for the construction of the common thing. The informative vocation of governmental institutions is never extent from hues related to advertising discourse and the political discourse. It is in the communicational campaigns when those hues arise with more strength. To work on these texts, we will take into account their specific ways of processing the graphicargumentative styles in each period, as a result of enunciative operation.