Media, Politics, and Democratization in Latin America
by Javier Campo, Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
This issue has a predecessor from decades ago: Culture in the Age of Mass Media (Burton and Franco, 1978). Forty years may have gone by, but some problems and major concepts remain: resistance, ideological manipulation (though today we use the term “hegemonic cultural influence”), mass communication, and new media technologies. Latin America was then ruled by some of history’s bloodiest military dictatorships, while today the return of right-wing governments after a decade of popular governments is disconcerting. The hopeful ending of Burton and Franco’s introduction (“This repression has been unable to destroy the people’s culture, which continues to find avenues to express resistance” [1978: 10]) has led to a fruitful harvest in recent years, quickly provoking a backlash (often violent). Today we are witnessing a substantial investment in the militarization of police forces and electronic surveillance systems—in particular, the social networks used by young cyber-activists who have grown up with the Internet and, as Linda Herrera (2014: 2–3) points out regarding the riots in Egypt (the “Twitter revolution”), are accustomed to defending their political agendas online.
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