Al sur de la modernidad: Comunicación, globalización y multiculturalidad (Serie Nuevo Siglo)

by Jesús Martín-Barbero

Latin America encapsulates a debate between the resistance of its traditions and the contemporaneity of its backwardness, between the contradictions of its modernization and the ambiguities of its development, between its early modernism and its late and heterogeneous modernity. In these debates, the social sciences meet again with philosophical reflection and, in turn, with daily experience. This daily experience is the one that, as much or more than the crisis of the paradigms, is demanding us to change not only the established structures but also the questions. This debate is today linked in a very special way to the field of communication, which has become crucial when it comes to imagining and naming new models of society, such as the 'information society' where information becomes vital for its operation and development and also society is organised following the logic of communication models. Communication becomes relevant in the renewal of analysis models of social
action, in the renewal of the research agenda and in the epistemological and political reformulation of critical theory. Communication becomes a constitutive element of the new conditions of knowledge. Knowledge is no longer at the service of uniting but represents an opening to an unlimited horizon of exploration while exposing the local character of all discourses. This book collects texts from recent years, especially from the 90s, scattered in magazines and collective books, many are rewritten in the field of political and aesthetic tensions where Cultural Studies is anchored. In this exercise, some texts step on each other's toes, taking up similar ideas to clarify or broaden them.

Paperback

First published December 30, 2003

About the author

Doctor en Filosofía, con estudios de Antropología y Semiología, era un experto en cultura y medios de comunicación que produjo importantes síntesis teóricas en Latinoamérica acerca de la posmodernidad. Aparte de ejercer docencia en Colombia y México, fue profesor visitante de las universidades Complutense de Madrid, Autónoma de Barcelona, Stanford, Libre de Berlín, King's College de Londres, Puerto Rico, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, entre otras. En 1975 fundó la Escuela de Comunicación Social de la Universidad del Valle1​ y en 2003 obtuvo la nacionalidad colombiana.

Su análisis de la cultura como mediaciones, el estudio de la globalización desde la semiología, la relación de los medios con sus públicos, y en especial la maneras como esto los interpretan, que estudió específicamente para el caso de las telenovelas en Latinoamérica, son algunos de sus aportes.