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Alejandra Phillippi & Claudio Avendaño
Santiago (Chile)
Communicative Empowerment:
Narrative Skills of the Subjects
Empoderamiento comunicacional: competencias narrativas de los sujetos
v Alejandra Phillippi Miranda is Professor at the School of Journalism of the Universidad Diego Portales
in Santiago (Chile) (alejandra.phillippi@udp.cl).
v Claudio Avendaño Ruz is Professor at the School of Journalism of the Universidad Diego Portales
in Santiago (Chile) (claudio.avendano@udp.cl).
Requested: 14-12-2009 / Received: 15-10-2010
Accepted: 12-11-2010 / Published: 01-03-2011
DOI:10.3916/C36-2011-02-06
ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes the educommunicational consequences of the transformations of mediated communication in
the process of digitization. We present qualitative empirical evidence on the use of mass media and digital
technologies from the digital convergence of media, the industry and the resulting complementary formats. Tele -
vision, in particular, has experienced a process of changing its formats and expressive content by delivering
interactivity, facilitating the expression of subjects by means of different technological devices. So from the
perspective of the subject, it is observed that the new technological devices and their new grammars are utilized
provided they contribute with meaning to his daily practice and biographical trajectory. Nevertheless, digital inclusion
policies have focused only on maximizing access to equipment and digital literacy associated to technology
applications and not to the narrative skills of the subjects. It is therefore necessary to generate new concepts that
allow new methodological guidelines, in communication and education academic processes, to promote the use of
new emerging digital spaces for communicational empowered citizens, that is, from competent to tell (expressive
skills) to more specifically, tell oneself (as an individual) and tell us (collectively). Finally, these will be the expressive
spaces of the new television with citizen´s expressions, fostered by converging elements of digital technology.
RESUMEN
El presente trabajo analiza las consecuencias educomunicativas de las transformaciones en la comunicación mediada
por el proceso de digitalización. Se presenta una constatación empírica de carácter cualitativo en el uso de los medios
masivos y las tecnologías digitales desde la convergencia digital de los soportes, la industria y la consecuente
complementariedad de los formatos. En este sentido la televisión ha vivido un proceso de cambios de sus continentes
y contenidos expresivos, entre otros aspectos al entregar interactividad, facilita la expresión de los sujetos, desde los
distintos dispositivos tecnológicos. Así a nivel de los sujetos se observa que los nuevos dispositivos tecnológicos y sus
nuevas gramáticas son usados en la medida que asumen un sentido en sus prácticas cotidianas y trayectorias
biográficas. No obstante, las políticas de inclusión digital solo se han centrado en la maximización del acceso a
equipamien to y en una alfabetización digital asociada a aplicaciones y no a las competencias narrativas de los sujetos.
Por tanto, es necesario generar nuevas conceptualizaciones que permitan nuevas orientaciones metodológicas
formativas en comunicación y educación que promuevan el uso de los nuevos espacios digitales emergentes como
ciudadanos empoderados comunicacionalmente, es decir, competentes para relatar (habilidades expresivas) más
específicamente relatarse (como individuo) y relatarnos (colectivamente). Finalmente, estos serán los espacios
expresivos de la nueva televisión con sus expresiones ciudadanas, propiciados por los elementos convergentes de la
tecnología digital.
KEYWORDS / PALABRAS CLAVE
Convergence, communicational policies, citizenship, empowerment, narrative competences.
Convergencia, políticas de comunicación, ciudadanía, empoderamiento, competencias narrativa.
Comunicar, nº 36, v. XVIII, 2011, Scientific Journal of Media Litreracy; ISSN: 1134-3478; pages 61-68
www.revistacomunicar.com
DOSSIER
1. Introduction
When identifying the strategic factors of the guiding
principles of the future progress in the field of commu -
nications and education, these can be seen to make up
three main axes: the complexity and permanent changes
to the information-communi-cations systems; the
characterization of the «prosumers» of the same system;
and proposing possible strategies to strengthen the
narrative competences (through the mass media and
infor-mation and communication techno logies) of
civilians, starting with children and adolescents.
The present study attempts to take into consi -
deration the need for an integral communications
policy that deals with, from the state, the different
dimensions implied by the development of the infor -
mation-communications industry and, especially, the
narrative competences required by subjects in order to
participate in the Society of Information.
The above is founded upon qualitative research
that shows, from the subjects themselves, the strategic
nature of mass media and ICT in socially excluded
sectors.
2. From industrial media to information-
communications system
Aguaded (1999) indicates that the four strategic
elements to be incorporated into education for
television are:
• Family, by constituting the natural space for
television usage.
• School, because of its central formative function.
• Civil society, because of its ability to «press» for
a television for all citizens.
• Communications media, as it is responsible for
the contents and programs they show.
These four mediating elements will probably
continue to be fundamental as far as the challenges to
researching the dynamizing factors of education and
television. However, the scenario has changed,
becoming even more complex; in just over fifteen
years the mass media system was transformed by the
digitalization of many processes, a situation which also
affected the basic institutions: from politics to the
school, from entertainment to economics. Castells
(1996) indicates that it has to do with structural
changes and not simply cosmetic technological
innovations.
In this way, it is now possible to verify that there is
a technological convergence of digital platforms that
has modified the industry and media consumption.
There is also an imminent need to understand, within
this new context, the forms of use and appropriation
of traditional supports like television and the instances
of symbolic participation acquired by the audiences as
converted into «prosumers», based on the interactive
options offered by even the web versions of these
same TV channels. In this sense, it is necessary to
consider that the subjects fit into a single consumption
diet, the «new and old» communication devices
(Tudela, Tabernero & Dwyer, 2008).
On the other hand, children and teenagers have
been important in the implementation and under-
standing of these changes at a cultural level, and not
only a communicational one. They form, in many
cases, the vanguard of adoption of broader social and
communications innovations. Mead (1971) stated that
a younger age group was beginning to be formed, that
would produce its own cultural-symbolic systems,
even without fully considering the proposals of
traditional agencies of socialization such as the family
and school. Probably, during the first few years of this
century, characterized by high-speed changes, it is
precisely the teenagers and children who are
protagonists of many symbolic proposals. However, to
this we should also add marketing and publicity that
have broadened their «protagonism».
The growing complexity of the phenomenon
leads us to question the categories used up to this
moment and that are obviously valid for certain
historical periods. It is rational to begin reflecting on
new categorizations to understand this phenomenon
from a more cultural-communicational perspective
rather than based on age (Saintout, 2006).
ICT has assumed an increasingly central position
in the daily lives of social subjects of this century, and
the differences provoked by the digital gap are still
insurmountable in many cases. This is no more than
the expression of structural differences with socio-
cultural origins, so we should refer to it more as a
digital social gap, and therefore the action of almost all
states to design and implement school and community
programs to help minimize differences of access and
use of ICT. The digital gap in its one-dimensional
version, limited to access, has changed to a multi -
dimensional perspective (Villanueva, 2006) which
allows us to approach the issue from the socio-
commu nicational sphere.
Ford (1999) already used the concept of infor-
mation-communications to describe how ICT and
traditional media make up an integrated system of
growing importance not only in communications but
also as a strategic economic sector. The new commu -
nicational devices make up a group of digital resources
that inhabit the daily lives of the subjects. Never -
62
© ISSN: 1134-3478 • e-ISSN: 1988-3293 • Pages 61-68
Comunicar, 36, XVIII, 2011
theless, the social differences in which information-
communications are inserted are multiple and not
merely limited to access to equipment, but they are
also related to cultural factors. Ford (1999: 162)
indicates that, «at the center of all of this is the abysmal
difference between cultural, technological and
economic power of mergers and the North
Americanization that faces various and multiple
cultures».
3. From receptors to «prosumers»
Different studies (UNICEF, 2010; Robinson,
Ketsnbaum, Neustadtl & Álvarez, 2002) indicate that
digital devices tend to have a similar importance as that
of TV in children’s and teen agers’ daily lives.
However, if this phenomenon is associated with
socio economic differences, we can see that children
and teenagers from lower-income levels have less
access to ICT than those from middle and upper
classes. These would appear
to continue using TV to a
significant degree due to a lack
of options for using digital
devices (Con sejo Nacional de
Tele visión de Chile, «National
Television Council of Chile»,
2009). This is especially
relevant because the social
uses of information-commu -
nications probably constitute
an important change. Jenkins
(2008: 14) proposes that
cultural convergence is one of
the attributes of emerging
commu nicational practices,
understood as «the flow of
contents through multiple media platforms and the
migratory behavior of media audiences willing to go
anywhere in search of the desired type of enter -
tainment experiences».
This places communicational practices on a
cultural-symbolic plane, in which subjects use techno -
logical devices as a form of what Lull (2000) calls
symbolic power, with the central distinction that it no
longer has to do with the construction of meaning based
on what is seen/read/heard from the industrial commu -
nications media. Rather, convergence poses the
possibility of generating symbolic proposals that take into
account the experience of the subjects them selves,
communicational products that in «form and content»
express their individual points of view: feelings which
make up emotions and ideas to be shared.
What is also relevant is that these expressions can
be shared not only on the local/national level, but also
in regional/global spaces, or more precisely what Sin -
clair (2000) calls «geo-linguistic regions».
Subjects have the possibility of receiving and
generating proposals for meaning, based on the use of
information-communication system devices; they are
able to generate «stories» and «micro-stories» that tie
them to concerns and issues that involve their own
experience and that of others. In other words, it entails
talking about oneself from a space that involves
«otherness».
These symbolic spaces of conversation are
evidently different, from issues proposed by mass
media to neighborhood problems, from an environ -
mental perspective to reduced employment opportu -
nities, from criticism of the educational system to their
own affective experiences.
However, on all of these planes, it is not only
necessary to have «experience» from which to
«recount», nor devices and necessary «digital literacy»,
but also a certain cultural capital is needed (Bourdieu,
1997). Although it is true that available digital
technology allows those with access to it the oppor -
tunity to participate in communicational experiences
beyond their daily terrain (the daily here-and-now) this
does not necessarily imply having a «domain» over
communication, given the differences in cultural
capital and narrative competences. Tudela, Taber -
nero and Dw yer (2008: 103) mention two categories:
on the one hand, the «initial level» of use that implies
managing e-mail and Internet navigation and, on the
other, an «advanced» level that involves the active
participation in the generation, production, edition and
distribution of contents.
There is also an imminent need to understand, within this
new context, the forms of use and appropriation of
traditional supports like television and the instances of
symbolic participation acquired by the audiences as
converted into «prosumers», based on the interactive options
offered by even the web versions of these same TV
channels.
63
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Comunicar, 36, XVIII, 2011
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Comunicar, 36, XVIII, 2011
64
Nevertheless, having access to computer
equipment does not necessarily imply the management
of expressive resources to transform them into
communicationally active subjects. A study done in
Santiago, Chile, PNUD (2006) shows the limitations
to access/use and limits imposed by precarious living
conditions on the symbolic realm. Although this
certainly does not imply determinism, it does take into
account a «context» that affects the communicational
competences of the subjects. It concludes that «teen -
agers from low-income families, once they are
disconnected from their schools, highly reduce their
use of the Internet. When added to high rates of
unemployment, it would over time generate a lack of
opportunities to apply what they learned in school and
a difficulty for reintegrating into the world of New
Information and Communications Technology in the
future». This shows how the use of ICT is associated
with the position and context of the subject, that is,
structural living conditions, also opening up other
questions, such as, «why use technology?» (PNUD,
2006: 98).
This is backed by another study by Avendaño and
Phillippi (2009) on the use and valuation of digital
technologies in working-class sectors, using focus
groups and ethnographic interviews. It shows that the
meaning that subjects give to the Internet and other
digital devices generates differences with regards to
uses beyond communication (e-mail, chat) and
entertainment (games), in other words, at the «initial
level».
On the other hand, Phillippi and Peña (2010)
1
, in
a study on the development of women who use
public-access telecentres, showed a trend of more
intensive use by those women that found meaning in
the Internet, while they show differing levels of
domain over navigation.
Therefore, the uses in which the subjects
participate require having access, managing basic
elements of digital literacy, and it is especially relevant
to have constructed a sense of
Internet use, that is, the pre-
text established by the subjects
to relate their own biography
(socio-culturally situated) to
some determined uses. The
concept of social uses, in
communicational terms, comes
from studies by Lull (1999)
with families in the United
States and research by Martin
Barbero (1992) in Colombia
based on soap operas. In both
cases, the social uses are
determined by the subject and
his or her micro/macro social
context, which allows for the
construction of specific
meanings.
To illustrate the concept of
the meaning of Internet usage,
we will present four cases,
which come from the above -
mentioned studies and the authors’ experience in
training workshops with classroom teachers:
a) Meaning: promise of overcoming and
consolidating. In the community of Lo Prado, in north -
west Santiago, a marginal community built during the
government of Salvador Allen de as a result of squatting
by homeless people, three families live together: the in-
laws who have lived there since the house was built,
Evelyn, her husband and 13-year-old daughter and
the other son of the homeowners with his wife. To
the original house, a series of rooms have been added
for children that, for lack of options, gradually came to
stay there.
Evelyn’s husband works in a company that installs
cable TV, and he spends most of the day outside of
the house, since he also has to travel outside of
Santiago. This couple’s main concern is that their
daughter receive a good education and avoid spending
Communications policies of this century must incorporate
new dimensions in their designs, so as to take on the
challenges posed by technological changes and new business
models of the industry. It is essential that they incorporate a
new perspective, from communications and education, that
takes into consideration the formation of a subject to
communicationally participate in the new possibilities offered
by digital TV and various devices that offer access to it,
from traditional home appliances and mobile phones; from
the office and the classroom.
© ISSN: 1134-3478 • e-ISSN: 1988-3293 • Pages 61-68
Comunicar, 36, XVIII, 2011
65
so much time with the teens from the neighborhood,
since they believe that she will only learn «bad habits»,
in this case associated with delinquency and drugs
that, according to them, are rife throughout the street.
Because of this, they have invested in a large TV and
at the start of the year they bought a computer for their
daughter to do her homework. For Evelyn and her
husband, the computer and TV are factors that keep
their daughter at home, so that she can concentrate on
her studies, without needing to go out on the street.
However, Evelyn’s daughter has also managed to
develop a certain domain over the Internet: she has
her own Fotolog, she comments on sites of interest
and connects with people from other cultural and
geographic areas that are different from her own. The
main problem has been to make the monthly payments
of the Internet service, and since money is always
scarce they have agreed to share the costs of the
service with the sister-in-law. This has allowed them
to make the monthly payments not too far beyond their
due date, although they are not always so successful
with this.
b) Meaning: development of new abilities.
Rolando lives a few blocks from Evelyn. He is in the
sixth grade, he is 13 years old and since two years ago
he has a computer that was given to him by an uncle
that lives in another neighborhood and who had
replaced his PC with a new one. When he gave it to
Rolando, he mentioned that it had a few small
problems that he did not know how to fix. It was at
that moment that Rolando, out of necessity, decided to
«repair» computers that had minor imperfections, and
he became the neighborhood expert. Although
demand for his services is not very high, when he gets
repair jobs that take him only 30 or 45 minutes to fix,
he invites his friends to have ice cream and sodas.
Since he knows that software and applications are
constantly being updated, he has become a good
friend of the teacher who mans the computer lab at
the school where he studies, in order to stay up-to-
date and to have a representative. Here a horizon of
new potential professional practices has opened up to
him, as well as the search for specialized information
that may be useful for his «trade».
c) Meaning: window to diversity. Carolina is an
elementary school teacher at a private school in a very
exclusive neighborhood of Santiago. She has been
working in the area of language for the past few years
and is in charge of groups of adolescents that, in her
opinion, are not really connected to the world beyond
their homes and neighborhood. She believes that the
true educational process is not limited to developing
the curricular contents, but rather it is also for forming
citizens who are conscious of the complex reality of
the country in which they live. Because of this, she
tends to encourage her students to be more open-
minded and autonomous, as well as to use media
communications tools to access situations beyond their
daily lives. Communication media such as television
and the Internet make this job easier since the analysis
of the television and information agenda that she asks
of them, allows them to establish necessary bridges to
cross in order to form a more comprehensive idea of
the country. She has generated a project involving
blogs and online social networks to favor the
discussion of public issues.
d) Meaning: tool for communication and
belonging. Maria lives in a working-class neigh -
borhood in West Santiago. Her neighborhood was
built a few years ago by the state, and it consists of
four-story apartment buildings, with a minimum
square footage to house a family of four or five people.
However, various circumstances have led the
inhabitants to receive other family members or
children along with their families. During the past few
years, Maria has converted to Protestantism (some -
times called Evange lical) after conversations with a
neighbor. In addition to going to church on Sundays,
she frequently listens to Christian radio programs and,
especially, goes to an Internet café that is a few blocks
from her house. She uses communications tools that
offer Internet in order to stay in touch with her church
community. In this sense, Internet allows her to feel
part of a group with a high sense of belonging.
Although she has also become more open to social
issues and current events, which have generated
greater commitment and involvement with the
situation in her own neigh borhood, even taking on a
certain informal leadership position.
The converging dimensions in these synthesized
examples of the relationship people establish with
mediated communications (media communications
and ICT) allow us to establish the following:
• In all cases (saturation) the uses of commu -
nicational and digital devices help people to develop
means of communication with individuals that they
have previously known and also with whom they seek
to intensify their friendship. In this way, it allows them
to overcome the limits of their own everyday
experiences, de-territorializing communication.
• There is a reason for the use of the commu -
nicational devices. The subjects presented recognize a
«before» (Orozco, 1996) from which they construct a
media/digital diet based on their own subjectivity.
© ISSN: 1134-3478 • e-ISSN: 1988-3293 • Pages 61-68
Comunicar, 36, XVIII, 2011
66
• Likewise, the development of grammatical and
technological competences allows them to participate
in an interactive communicative process –prosumers–
that entails the development of comprehensive and
expressive abilities.
• There is a convergence between «off» and «on»
between mediated communication and the
interpersonal and group communicative processes.
There is no gap separating digital from analog or both
these from daily practices. The communicative
practices are inserted into their lives.
• There is an interrelationship between bio -
graphy/context/text. The texts appropriated and
generated by the subjects are not only related to the
socioeconomic and cultural context but also to the
paths of their own life stories.
• Because of this, it can be seen that the dual
categories that have been used: digital/analog; on/off;
receptor/broadcaster do not make sense in the case of
these subjects that, despite their limited economic
conditions, are able to use their symbolic power to
access different points of view, establish relationships,
and definitely use their communicational capacities to
project their lives.
Nevertheless, these micro life stories are
exceptions within the context of the mentioned
studies, in which the «initial level» tends to dominate.
4. The fifth element: communications policies
Aguaded (1999) reasonably affirms that, by
definition, there are four forms of television mediation:
family, school, civil society and the communications
media themselves. However, at the beginning of this
century and the end of the 20
th
, we have seen that
communications policies have once again been given
strategic importance, primarily because of the process
of digitalization and the need to regulate the
development of the information-communications
industry. This fifth element has meant that different
governments have generated their own programs of
digital inclusion, based on the verification of a social
digital gap, especially in the countries of the Southern
Hemis phere. These programs go from the subsidy of
the demand for computer equipment by telecentres, to
digital governance and the incorporation of digital
technology in schools. In this way, governments have
multiplied their efforts to achieve universal access,
which has occurred almost at the same time as the
digitalization of TV.
In Chile, from the publication of the «Blue Book»
(1999) during the presidency of Eduardo Frei to
«Digital Strategy» by the government of Michelle Ba-
chelet (2008), we can see the progression of public
policies in this area. However, although progress has
been made in the development of programs that
maximize universal access and digital literacy,
specifically in spaces of citizen participation there is
much more to be done to develop communicational
and narrative competences. The PNUD report
(2006:192) indicates that, «skeptical users have
appeared, pointing out the Internet’s limits to
influencing the public sphere, as well as the Chilean
social characteristics that also impede this from
happening». This demonstrates the communicational
deficit of Internet and, by extension, the commu -
nications media, which have a high level of
concentration (Sunkel & Geoffroy, 2001).
From the communicational perspective and,
especially, from Communications and Education, it is
necessary to review the conceptualizations and make
proposals to contribute to the formation of critical,
conscientious citizens with narrative competences that
allow them to participate in information-commu -
nicational public spaces, both individually and
collectively. The development of terrestrial digital TV
may provide the opportunity to question the
dimensions of the public sphere and open possibilities
for participation that this new technological advance
offers. To do so, we need to strengthen the subjects’
abilities to offer greater options in the construction of
new meanings.
Communications policies of this century must
incorporate new dimensions in their designs, so as to
take on the challenges posed by technological changes
and new business models of the industry. It is essential
that they incorporate a new perspective, from
communications and education, that takes into
consideration the formation of a subject to commu -
nicationally participate in the new possibilities offered
by digital TV and various devices that offer access to
it, from traditional home appliances and mobile
phones; from the office and the classroom.
In short, the TV of the future, which in a way is
already here, is more and more interactive, pushing
aside the old Fordist TV that only allowed symbolic
appropriation. Now, it is not only possible to see and
obtain meaning from new physical spaces (mobile
phones), but also to create and distribute material, in
essence construct MY television. These changes at the
level of the uses given to them by subjects must be
included in Communications Policies, insofar as they
are a part of communication law in the 21st century.
For this, it is not enough to merely demand plurality at
the level of mediated communications, but also to
© ISSN: 1134-3478 • e-ISSN: 1988-3293 • Pages 61-68
Comunicar, 36, XVIII, 2011
67
provide public programs to train citizens in the use of
communications.
Now it is commonplace to say that political
circumstances are affected by the media and that the
democracy of surveys is influenced by the media’s
agenda, and therefore it is necessary that the subjects
not only have access to elections and opinion surveys,
but that they also begin to participate in the public
sphere through their own stories. This has already
begun as indicated by Castells (2009:395), «the public
sphere is a space of social and meaningful interaction
where ideas and values are formed, transmitted,
backed up and fought for, a space that ultimately
becomes a training camp for action and reaction».
The challenge is to institutionalize these practices
from Communications and Education and, more
specifically, from education through communications,
obviously including television and ICT.
5. Towards communicational empowerment
Bauman (2002: 37) points out that the social
processes of this liquid modernity tend to «transform
human identity from something given as a task, making
the actors responsible for carrying out this task and the
consequences (collateral effects) of their work»; it is
what Beck (2001) calls institutionalized individualism.
In this sense, it is not strange that digital technologies
and the transformations of large industrial media such
as TV have to accommodate themselves to the new
subject and even go to where the individual is. Large
audiences that are socio-culturally situated in a specific
space and time, correspond to another time, heavy
Fordism that has been replaced by nomadism and
mobility. This does not mean the disappearance of the
social realm, but rather an eclipse of categories to
understand it. In this way, we move from identity to
identities in social contexts that are increasingly
changing and «liquid» (Touraine, 2005).
Likewise, the solid media industries must adapt
more quickly to subjects and communities that have
greater possibilities, not just for selecting contents but
also for interacting in public spaces. For many years,
the main job of Communications and Education,
especially in the Latin American context, was to
«multiply voices», in a public space seized by just a few
(Kaplún, 1985). The analytical and methodological
proposals tended, on one hand, towards generating a
conscientious and critical view of the mass media and,
on the other, sought to create communicational spaces
and devices for marginal groups to express themselves.
Although media concentration continues to be a
reality, having critical capacities is still a relevant factor,
and today there are information-communicational
devices that offer the possibility of expressing the
viewpoints of the subjects. Perhaps an individualized
expression that overshadows group expression, but it
is precisely from there that we see new challenges
emerge like those we mentioned earlier; today,
citizenship is lived at the level of media commu -
nications, a both individual and collective experience.
The proposal made by Communicational
Empowerment seeks to take on the new challenges
posed by changes in the subjects, social processes and
new devices and grammars that include «new and old
media». There are three dimensions from which to
define and construct this educational-communicational
perspective.
The first dimension is generated from citizenship
and civil society. Both the market and the state provide
the resources, knowledge and technology to make
their points of view public and to exercise symbolic
pressure. Even the area of strategic communication,
which first appeared in companies, has been adopted
by the state and politics. There are some relevant
cases in which strategic communications have been
used in the third sector, but not widespread. What is
necessary is for the people to promote and strengthen
themselves communicationally.
A second aspect is oriented around the
development of the narrative capacities of the subjects,
in other words, promoting expressive abilities to
construct stories. This is associated with a certain level
of cultural capital, since we understand that commu -
nication and culture are two inseparable dimensions.
For this reason, it is also assumed as a task for
educational institutions, due to their role as
reproducers of the cultural capital of the subjects.
Narrative competences imply critical and reflexive
abilities, not only for media communications but also
for the social context of the subjects. Additionally, it
assumes not only familiarity with technology, but
domain over the emerging grammars that allow a
subject, for example, to tell their stories in 140
characters. This obviously has to do with cultural
matrices such as the use of language, discourse
strategies, among other factors.
In third place is the coordination among the
subjects themselves to be able to organize themselves
with regards to common objectives or social
movements. Obviously, it is also possible to participate
in dialogues that emerge in the media spaces (such as
TV and social networks). The inter-textual dialogues
are a frequent practice today, TV journalist use online
social networks not only to present their points of
view, but they also use topics that are of interest to the
people. It is evident that there is a dialogue between,
for example, «tweeters» and certain communicators
that, although still weak, is starting to increase. These
are the new converging communicative realities:
spaces of social coordination. They are not isolated
cases, but rather show a more widespread pheno -
menon of collective experiences in which «on» and
«off» are intertwined.
«Communicational empowerment» as a socio-
communicative space, in which subjective is mixed
with social, critical analysis with expression, also
implies a methodological direction that takes from
Latin American active-participative traditions that have
gained strength during the past 40 years and even
earlier with the concepts of Paulo Feire. These
continue to work if they are re-appropriated during
this new century, within the framework of the new
technological scenario and emerging social dynamics,
precisely because they focus on work with sectors that
have been socially excluded but, as we saw in the four
cases presented, are communicatively active when
they find a meaning beyond that of entertainment,
although this is certainly an integral part of the
pleasures of communications.
Communicational Empowerment implies learning
to tell about the new social context with the available
communicational technologies (new TV and ICT) in
order to help subjects talk about themselves and for us
to talk collectively about ourselves.
Notes
1Phillippi, A. & Peña, P. (2010). «Mujeres y nuevas tecnologías en
Chile: el impacto del acceso público a las TIC, la inclusión digital de
género», a paper currently being written under the 2010 Amy
Mahan Fellowship Program to Assess the Impact of Public Access to
ICTs. The paper is studying working-class sectors of the Metro -
politan and O’Higgins Regions with regards to the implementation
of a program called «Quiero Mi Barrio» (I Love My Neighborhood,
in English). This paper provides an analysis of the results of surveys
and the first focus groups held in a neighborhood located in south
Santiago.
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