JÓVENES, CULTURA ESCRITA Y TECNOCULTURA. Análisis de los resultados arrojados por la encuesta en una investigación sobre lectura, escritura, conocimiento y tecnocultura en la universidad
Giovanna Carvajal Barrios
Parting from a conceptualization of what the written culture means and its importance over the educational systems during the Western Modernity, this article develops a hypothesis around the crisis of the written culture in our surroundings; and it brings forth empirical evidences provided by a survey on the 259 students who had participated in the research over “Writing, knowledge, and techno-culture on campus.†The methodology includes a reading test and a writing test, the results of which were disclosed in another article. This one, on the other hand, analyses the survey that asked about the students’ socio-economical class, their reading and writing practices before and after being admitted to the university. It furthermore inquired about the academic and extra-curricular spaces such practices provided; about the kinds of sociability that favored their relationship with the written culture through reading and writing; it verified the educational level of their parents, the usage of audiovisual means and new communication and information technologies (PC and internet), their interactions with them, and their ways of acquiring those knowledges that derive from their relationship with written texts, the media, and technologies. Considering writing as a technology, this text shows its articulations with the others in the current historical conditions of college education in our country. The analysis shows the contrast between the crisis of a written culture, historically precarious in the Colombian education, and the rising of the contemporaneous techno-culture, as a result of a cultural transformation from which many of the reading and writing problems on behalf of the students are derived, problems the diagnosis and solutions of which transcend the boundaries of disciplinary researches, be they linguistical, semiotic, or literary.
Opinión pública y opinión crÃtica. (Un modelo para interpretar la prensa de opinión)
Pedro Posada Gómez
The text stems from a final research report. It presents a theoretical framework to analyzing the usage of the public opinion concept in the press; and it offers some conclusions over the pertinence in applying that theoretical framework unto the analysis of a texts corpus composed by editorials and opinion columns. The theoretical framework aims at showing the analysis tools and the basic theoretical concepts which three theories could contribute to the understanding of the object of the study. They are: Perelman- Olbrechts’s argumentation theory (mainly their ideas about the kinds of argumentation premises); Eric Landowski’s socio-semiotic focus over the public opinion notion and the attitudes of “the political class†towards it; and Jürgen Habermas’s reconstruction of the genesis and decadence of the “political public opinion†social category, in addition to his theory over the role the public opinion has to undertake in a democratic society. The text is interjected by the question whether the mass media would contribute to the democratic formation with a civic will that would become an authentic public opinion.
Teenagers were always protagonists of several movements of social transformation. Utopian or radical, these activities have permitted those new actors to face changes in the political and social structures of many countries. Youth today is a type of good that is sold on TVs, radios, newspapers, magazines, Internet, academy gyms, theatres, shopping malls and in a variety of urban places. Means of communication do not disregard this globalized teen that is informed about most of the sophisticated technologies because he is a natural consumer. Knowing the evolution, the interaction and the interchange from literature to the teen edition that is usually offered by media to this specific public is what has inspirited this article.