Modernity and mass communication

The general aim of this research is to elaborate a historically and empirically grounded account of the mass media and modernity in Latin America, connected with the main socio-economic, political and cultural issues raised by the emergence and evolution of modernity in the region. This account tries to show that a process of 'mediazation' of culture has been one of the constitutive features of Latin American modernity and one of the most important cultural transformations associated with its constitution and development. In Part I, I discuss critically the main theoretical works concerned with the importance of mass communication for modernity. In Part II, I examine, as a point of reference, the media and the Western European trajectory of modernity. Part III, the main part of the thesis, is focused on the Latin American trajectory of modernity, analyzed in terms of changes within the institutions of mass communication and, as a context, of the discourses of modernity and the institutions of material allocation and authoritative power. I attempt to explain in which ways media institutions, particularly the press in the nineteenth century and broadcasting in the twentieth, have been decisive for the transformations of the private and public spheres of modern Latin American societies. At the same time, I attempt to demonstrate the complex relations that the institutions of mass communication have established with the other main social institutions of Latin American modernity.