Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

ISSN 1012-1587/ ISSNe: 2477-9385

Depósito legal pp. 198402ZU45

Portada: S/T. De la serie “RETORNO”.

Artista: Rodrigo Pirela

Medidas: 60 x 60 cm

Técnica: Mixta/Tela

Año: 2009

Año 38, Regular No.100 (2023): 12-16

ISSN 1012-1587/ISSNe: 2477-9385

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7637368

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

EDITORIAL

Public communication, political communication and disruptive

technologies

In this editorial I propose to present a brief commentary on the

categories of public communication and political communication. The

consideration is based on the intervention in the public space of

disruptive technologies, which have come to mean for modern society a

radical transformation in all its core aspects, especially in societal

referents. The question is to be guided by the question that underlies this

type of conceptual relationship, which is traditional, one might say, since

the dawn of politics at the time of the Greek Enlightenment in the 5th

century B.C. While communication is consubstantial with human nature,

politics in its original sense is also consubstantial. They are two

consubstantial (essential) elements of the same entity: the human being.

However, the question assails us in these times of socio-technological

transformation because it reaches dimensions of thought and action that

are novel in their approach and their consequences: What is the

relationship between public communication and political communication

in times of technological disruption? We can best approach this question

in the light of H.G. Gadamer's dialogical hermeneutics and his strategy of

the hermeneutic circle: interpretation goes from the whole to the parts

and from the parts to the whole. So, the perspective we have on this issue

is reaching increasingly complex levels due to the advances of digital

technologies, which we have called disruptive, precisely because of the

consequences that socio-technical development brings in the relational

becoming and shaping of the social fabric in times of metaverse and

artificial intelligence.

Despite the increasingly strong presence of the two technological

innovations mentioned above, public communication attempts to remain

unscathed by the processes of interaction brought about by disruptive

technologies, which rather distort it or tend to eliminate it. If we consider

that communication is the very nature of the human being (Aristotle,

1985), it is only carried out through what this same classical philosopher

of the century of the Greek Enlightenment calls logos, which is the same

as argumentation. Therefore, we start from this premise: communication

in the public space, public communication, is not only the process that is

woven around information, but it is at the same time argumentation.

Hence, for this author, communication is logos but also action resulting

from argumentation (one argues in order to generate action).

13

Editorial

Opción, Año 38, Regular No.100 (2023): 12-16

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

This being true, communication in the public space will have an

ingredient that the latest version of the Frankfort School also points out:

for Habermas, communication is a process that takes place in the spaces

of intersubjective interaction, since it is the very nature of the human

being, as stated by the Stagirite. For the German philosopher,

communication is the fundamental element that the subject uses to shape

the world of life; hence, public communication is its guiding element,

since it is based on the elementality of the human being: communication,

which is raised as argumentation. Public communication from this

perspective consequently possesses the other dimension necessary for the

establishment of the world of life: public action, that is, political action

(Botero Montoya, 2006).

So the connection is self-evident; public communication is political

communication, since the political is what is proper to human beings in

society. The social fabric is formed in the public space, because thanks to

it, social life unfolds as a skein that structures the strengths on which

human life is built; human life will be a world of life since the

communicative processes are carried out in an open way, so that each

member is wrapped by the presence of the other subjects that make up

their social conglomerate. Hence, in order to live life, it is necessary to

establish rules and conditions that allow all members of society to

provide them with security of action, to the extent that the sense of the

social is reconstructed between the private individual and the public

social. This is where the public communication/political communication

dichotomy comes into play.

It follows that political communication reconstructs the social fabric

for the purposes of present and future coexistence. The political will thus

depend on the communicative process as an essential dimension for the

conformation of the structures necessary for those ends. From the

current theories about communication, this is understood as we have

stated: with the purpose of achieving human ends, and these are

conjugated in the different dimensions in which the world of life is

articulated: social, political, economic, scientific, technological, but also

domestic and reproduction of life, among others. Therefore,

communication implies the freedom to express what each subject prefers

within the framework of his or her interests (Habermas, 1982), or his or

her sociopolitical aspirations in the context of the pluralism that

characterizes human life in society (Sartori, 2009).

Now, seen in this way, the relationship between public

communication and the political, political communication will be nothing

Editorial

14

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

other than the public manifestation of the necessary referents for the

establishment of those foundations that make possible present and future

coexistence; hence, political communication stands as the normative

dimension of public communication in its sense of watcher and

interpreter -as Habermas would say of philosophy- of public

communication. The normative dimension is pergegated by the idea of

the democratic principle (Habermas, 2010): political communication in its

sense of discourse, establishes the procedural bases for the establishment

of democracy as a system, since, according to this author, it is the only

means by which clean and transparent processes can be carried out for

the conformation of the statute of the democratic system of law; that is to

say, political communication will be an essential dimension in the process

of democratic coexistence.

Considering the above-mentioned relationships, the question that

guides this reflection takes on unusual force, since Modernity, which is

passing through a society marked by disruptive technologies, is subjected

to the ups and downs of this development more than in other disruptive

epochs. Information technologies are no longer such; they are now digital

technologies, since their essential philosophical element is not

information as such; it is information elevated to dimensions never

foreseen or endured. Digital technologies allow what did not happen with

ICTs in their beginnings in the 1980s. In the latter, the fundamental

structure was the directionality of the flow of information from the

centers of power to the citizen; now, with digital technologies (DT), there

are no centers of power as such: they are characterized by the idea of

networks. DTs form a grid that is supposed to be a skein that facilitates

communication. But this is far from being the case.

TDs are not only characterized by enchanting users who own

electronic devices in order to keep them always connected, but the

information that emerges in this context is no longer necessarily coming

from the centers of power (although they are in the restrictive sense of

the term); the information is generated from the user himself, who for

reasons of expressing his impressions, opinions, tastes, preferences,

emotions, sends to the digital agents, turned into centers of power,

information that is then translated into direct messages to the user in

order to offer not only goods traced from his own information, but

articulated as management of his emotions; that is, the bidirectionality of

information no longer exists, thus almost annulling the disappearance of

the communicative processes.

15

Editorial

Opción, Año 38, Regular No.100 (2023): 12-16

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

Botero Montoya's (2006) statement regarding opinion polls is raised

to the umpteenth power not only for the purpose of changing opinion (p.

10-11), which the author calls sondeocracy, i.e. the exercise of political

power based on opinion polls in order to change the opinion of citizens

and thus obtain benefits for those who have ordered the polls. 10-11),

which the author calls sondeocracy, i.e., the exercise of political power

based on opinion polls in order to change the opinion of citizens and

thus obtain the profits of those who have ordered the study; but in this

phase of social disruption, the opinion that is to be imposed, or that is to

be denigrated, in order to maintain or achieve the hegemonic exercise of

power, is individually teledirected. We are going through a new phase of

communication in which dialogue is blurred to impose a dynamic of

neural control of power: political communication is psychopolitical (Han,

2017), due to the intervention by technological agents in order to control

emotions; we are talking about a psychopower that imposes itself at the

pace of TDs.

According to the above, political communication in times of TD is

practically marginalized and without the possibility of imposing itself as

such communication. It must be free and with possibilities of being able

to express itself in all its intersubjective dimension. Political

communication, in its version of psychopolitics, by annulling the process

of dialogue through neural control (Han, 2017), or control of emotions,

causes the latter to occupy in the democratic process a second plane, or a

second level; it will no longer occupy the first, as in the classics cited, but

will rather have a stellar place but for the domination by technological

agents, at this point transformed into new capitalists, since they negotiate

the emotions of the deluded citizen. Communication in the digital society,

a consequence of TDs, does not establish a certain dimension of political

communication.

Dr. José Vicente Villalobos-Antúnez / Editor-in-Chief

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3406-5000

jvvillalobos@gmail.com

Editorial

16

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. FEC-LUZ

REFERENCIAS

Aristóteles (1985). Ética a Nicómaco, Editorial Gredos.

Botero Montoya, L. H. (2006). Comunicación pública, comunicación

política y democracia: un cruce de caminos. Palabra clave, Vol. 9 (2),

pp. 7-18.

Habermas, J. (1981). Historia y crítica de la opinión pública, Editorial Gustavo

Gili.

Habermas, J. (1982). Conocimiento e interés, Taurus.

Habermas, J. (2010). Facticidad y validez. Sobre el derecho y el estado democrático

de derecho en términos de teoría del discurso, Editorial Trotta.

Han, B.Ch. (2017). Psicopolítica, Herder.

Sartori, G. (2009). La democracia en 30 lecciones, Taurus.

UNIVERSIDAD

DEL ZULIA

Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales

Año 39, N° 100 (2023)

Esta revista fue editada en formato digital por el personal de la Oficina de

Publicaciones Científicas de la Facultad Experimental de Ciencias, Universidad del

Zulia. Maracaibo - Venezuela

www.luz.edu.ve

www.serbi.luz.edu.ve

produccioncientifica.luz.edu.ve

Esta obra está bajo la licencia:

Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)