Jesús Martín Barbero
ITESO, Guadalajara, México

Trans: Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier and Toby Miller.

This text brings together two investigations: an "in-depth survey" of mediators - social science researchers, artists, writers, people working in communications, designers, high school teachers - from six Colombian cities (three large ones, two medium-sized and one small, from different regions of the country) and a survey about the presence of "the cultural" in newspapers, radio and television. The objective of the first study is to inquire about the cultural changes introduced by modernization in Colombia and its link to the development of media as a constitutive element in the country's transformation. The other study is an inquiry into the changes that the very notions of "culture" and "the cultural" are currently undergoing in the agenda and discursive formats of mass media, in relation to technological transformations of media as well as structures of property and policy-making. Due to the complexity of the survey on which the first research is based, and the reduced number of polled people implied, its value derives more from the social and cultural representativity of those polled than in its statistical dimensions; that is, to the multiplicity of voices represented by actors, professions, differences in age and gender, and the typology provided by the size of the cities and different regions. Although the survey's format was designed to obtain information that contains analysis and reflection, it still constrains the answers, due to the need for brevity and clarity, conditions that lead to some simplification and stereotypfication.

I. The place of media in culture

The research was organized in three parts: a) the processes of change through which the main indicators of modernization in Colombia can be read and a balance of their advantages / disadvantages; b) the transformations in the lifeworlds regarding those spheres where the presence of modernity and the relations between traditions and modernity are thematized.; c) the place of media, their weight in processes and images of modernity that they build. I refer here to the results of the third part.

1. The mediation of the transformations

How do we understand the media: are they the cause, or only the expression and amplification of changes in society? And how do we make sense of media representations of social change and their relation to real life? Difficult though the task is, we must explain the interviewees' answers in terms of dual temporal planes of media representation. Thus, the importance attributed to the transformations generated by the media in the long run, -that is in the planes of perception, identity, values, and languages, - is obscured by the attention to immediate effects, those that are evident in the short run. Nevertheless, the prevailing idea is that the media are solely expressions or amplifications of changes produced in or by other instances of the social. The logic of the media ends up being paradoxical: they cannot cease to register / express the transformations of a globalized society, yet they cannot express these without masking and trivializing them. However, we also find another, minoritarian, line of thought that recognizes the constitutive dimensions of social processes and cultural dynamics in the media, especially in terms of knowledge and language, as well as in the role that computerization has played in restructuring quotidian life. Great importance is attributed to the media as catalysts of changes that "are in the environment," and to their capacity for jumping barriers, speedily taking information or images of change to the most remote places. From the contrast between different answers, it is possible to deduce a certain specificity in the actions of the media that expand sphere of influence of these changes, making it possible for people to see themselves reflected in their expectations, dreams, and desires, which in some measure legitimate the changes making them acceptable and possible.

The majoritarian conception is corroborated when we thematize the other side of the question: that which concerns the spheres of life that, in the images of the media, are being affected most profoundly by contemporary transformations. These are five: family, consumption, free time, public opinion, and aesthetic tastes. With regards to the family sphere, the media take up and emphasize changes related more specifically to the couple (infidelity, divorce, "free" relations, changes in women's status through their work outside the home and greater intellectual formation); to the relationship between parents and children (liberty and adolescence, devaluation of paternal authority, and the uncertainty or confusion of parents with regards to the new attitudes in children); and to the world of affect (precocity of adolescents, transformations in the affective horizon of women, difficulties for men in accepting the new affective freedom in women). This sphere primarily exists with reference to television, a medium dominated by publicity and by the drama series that emphasize changes in the affective and domestic world.

With regards to consumption, respondents emphasized the unpleasant ubiquity of the discourse of publicity, which impregnates time in television and radio as well as the print media. The persons polled mentioned three key strategies for inciting consumption: fashion, in its incessant renovation and its capacity for imposing models; eroticism, as an indispensable seductive ingredient of modern being; and the new heroes that emerge with the elevation of youth- from sport and music idols - as the supreme value of the modern.
With regards to free time, the media appear to the respondents in a double role, since they simultaneously are that which most frequently, and for most people, fills their free time, as well as an explicit or at least indirect proposal for the uses of free time. In general, the media identify free time with entertainment, diversion, evasion. But that which directly or indirectly is proposed differs clearly from one media to another. The major difference is between print media and television. The press tends, very explicitly, to propose the arts and reading as the best way for filling free time, interweaving, in some measure, learning and entertainment. Television, through an indirect discourse, transforms into propositions its devices for seduction: violence (or competition in sports) and sex. Sport appears not only as the spectacle of excellence of our times - olympic games, world soccer cups, athletic championships, regional and national soccer tournaments - but as a practice that brings about health, including all the paraphernalia of gyms and aerobics which feed the fin de siecle obsession with the body. Violence, obviously does not appear as a proposed practice, but as an ingredient of any human activity, including sports, and especially as a dimension of collective life, be it public or domestic, that would correspond to a profound and inevitable "human" need: violence resides not only in the streets or in work; in the intimacy of the home we also need violence in order to dream and have fun! Sex, freed from taboos and social constraints - even though television plays with these in order to attract more audience - appears as an object of demand as strong, or even stronger, than that of violence: there is no entertainment or diversion without a minimal presence or a subliminal charge of eroticism.
Public opinion appears as the transformational sphere executed in /by the media. In replacing the public plaza or the bar as "fora" for debate and for citizens' opinions in the last few years, the media, through surveys and opinion polls, have become the most powerful "source" of public opinion. These forms of knowledge are eloquent about the capacity for construction (and imposition) of opinion. But they tell us little about inquiry and debate over the diversity of opinions that are really at play in our society. As rulers adjust governmental measures, more to the oscillations of their image in opinion polls than to their program's principles, the media become a resonating box and quotidian source of surveys, in which the least important factor is the statistical rules of the game. The paradox could not be bigger: the more surveys, the less debate for citizens, and consequently, the less "public" the opinion that counts for the citizens to decide or the rulers to govern.
Finally, another sphere that is crucial to transformations through the media is aesthetic taste. Here, radio stands out in terms of musical taste, television in terms of domestic aesthetics and dress, and the press in terms of literature or visual arts. Changes in musical taste, especially of young people, are linked to the hegemony of certain genres, rhythms, styles, or even singers, shamelessly imposed by radio stations' DJs through repetition. On the other hand, television operates in two ways in the aesthetic sphere: through contagion, as its programs expose people to permanent contact with the aesthetically modern, be it in the organization or decoration of the home, forms of dress, or models of corporal beauty; and through imposition, via the homogenizing predominance of certain genres, such as soap operas, where television deforms taste in confronting it with only one aesthetic model. The print media, (daily or weekly periodicals), present another discourse (aside from publicity) which is that of the specialized critique in which, with or without the prestige of the critic's name, readers' tastes are oriented in certain directions, allowing the reader a greater capacity for choice and interpretation. Even though there are some cultural programs on television and radio - and in the larger cities, whole radio stations are dedicated to "cultural" programs- the public interested in these programs and radio stations is a minority, and generally coincides with the readers of cultural criticism in the press.

1. The medium that matters the most

This issue presents two sides. One corresponds to a general question about the most influential medium in the current processes of transformation. The other looks for the specific weight that each medium can have in certain processes, such as the decline in reading, availability of information, loss of privacy, cultural diversity, etc. These two faces are complementary and allow us to establish a contrast between the knowledge that inhabits quotidian experience and the reflexive effort required by the need to differentiate, contrast, and specify.
Television is, by far, the medium that is perceived by respondents as currently having the most weight, by a ratio of ten to one. In second place, we find radio, the printed media, and the computer. The things that make television the most influential medium are more negative than positive, although in some cases the assessment is not so clear, as it regards properties or effects that can be verified, but whose valuation can change when perceptions do. This is the case with two of the reasons that those surveyed stressed. One, the modification that television has brought in the space of the home and in family time. In many homes, the center of the main room is no longer the dining table, or chairs for conversation, but the television, around which the rest is organized. The place where the family meets the most is no longer the living or dining rooms, but the place where the television is installed, which frequently is the parents' bedroom; the layout of the home is even designed in such a way that the television can not only be seen from the bedroom but also from other rooms. With regards to the incidence of television in the organization of family time, be it as a group or of particular persons, the issue is not only the subordination of certain tasks in order to be able to see a certain program, but also the way in which television programming creates the daily rhythm - the morning or noon newscast, the afternoon competition, the evening's drama series or newscasts- or the reorganization of the weekend or of children's free time. Second, the development of a new, non-linear mode of perception and narration, that is especially common amongst adolescents or youth born "with" the television, and that responds on the one hand to strategies of appropriation of the incessant flux of images that dominate the screen, and on the other, to the fragmentation or discontinuity that mobilizes the new narratives of advertisement , videoclips, and certain types of cartoons or drama series, especially North American ones. In the same vein, those polled point out the capacity of television to mix and integrate reality with fiction, which displaces a certain realism from common sense, and feeds the moralistic behaviorism of positivistic psychology that ascribes to television the cause of certain deviant behaviors. At the same time, the insertion of hours and hours of fiction in the time and space of domestic routines displaces the categorical differentiation between work and play, art and life. But attenuating these positions, people also express that the value of time in television is not established solely with regards to the high economic inversion it implies, but also to the issue that this medium catalyzes, as no other, the general acceleration of the social time in which we live, in the same way that the short memory occupied by the majority of its narratives corresponds to the expansion of the ephemeral and disposable in our society, including that which traditionally is more lasting, such as art.

The global overview about the role that television is playing within the family is divided among those for whom television precipitates and reinforces the crisis of the family as an institution: "children and parents prefer to watch television instead of engaging in dialogue", "television has more credibility than adults", "young parents abandon their children to television"; and those for whom television has come to fill the void left by a family that is no longer constituted by the old and intense relation of other times.

With regards to the clearly negative reasons that make television the most influential medium, the "complaints notebook" is not only copious, but damning; so much so that it openly contradicts the resistance of the majority of those interviewed to accept some form of causality in the actions of the media on sociocultural changes. Television seduces people, creating an addiction that makes the spectator lose all critical capacity; television is responsible for the displacement and devaluation of reading brought about by the fascinating and facile nature of the image; television spectacularizes everything, transforming culture into entertainment; the growth of violent attitudes, or at least becoming accustomed to them, is in a large measure due to television, as well as the privatization of life and the atomization of the social. Let us take a detailed look of these opinions.

The word addiction is used to name two things: the strong attraction that people - from any social background but especially from the lower and middle classes, due to their low educational level and to the lack of cultural variety that is economically and spatially accessible - feel towards television, and the tendency in the assiduous television viewer to let himself be trapped by what he sees, losing the distance that makes it possible to question what is seen, leaving the spectator unarmed to face the stratagems available to the medium, creating an attitude of consent that will be maintained in many of life's scenarios. Television is also charged - especially in the facile and spectacularly seductive qualities of the image- with the devaluation of reading particularly among children and youth: in contrast to the labor of decoding required by the written text, the iconicity of the visual not only hands over knowledge that does not require any effort. It produces a fascination that makes the child lose the notion of time and difference between work and play, totally subordinating the principle of reality to that of pleasure. Therefore, that which is devalued by television is not solely reading, but knowledge, the capacity for complex argumentation and for systematic and rigorous work; that is, those elements that for centuries have represented the most valued forms of thinking. A minority of people polled qualify this statement by mentioning the responsibility of schools, their incapacity to take charge of the new sensibilities of youth forged by new forms of socialization of values and new modes of acquiring and circulating knowledge.
In the same sense, the tendency of television to trivialize culture is also highlighted by the respondents. In submitting culture to the inevitable spectacularization produced by the visual power of the computer, and the necessity of compressing it into the short and fragmented temporality of television formats, culture loses its context, the complexity of its processes and the diversity of its forms. What television presents as culture ends up being a deceptive simplification, a deforming image that people
would rather not see, because that way they would not mistake culture for what is only spectacularity and superficiality.

Violence is deemed indispensable. In newscasts as well as drama series, violence appears daily in a sensationalist, frivolous, and morbid garb on television. For this reason television is made responsible for the growth of aggression and the social acceptance of violence as a way of resolving conflicts, no matter how small. The frequency with which violence appears on television makes that violence lose its capacity for shocking and hurting us, turning into something that is harmless, something to which we are used so much that we no longer care. It is true that the quantity and disproportionate everydayness of violence in Colombia, overflows the capacity of feeling personally summoned, forcing us, in a certain way, to neutralize its psychic impact, in order to stay sane. But the frivolity and the habitual nature of violence on television reduce its impact to a momentary impulse that exhausts itself in sentimentality, or takes delight in macabre and morbid aspects, producing a voyeuristic and perversely complacent look.

Finally, television is attributed with being one of the major sources of the privatization of life and the atomization of the social, of individuals' retrieval into domestic space with the subsequent devaluation of sociality and common interest (Ver p. 9). This devaluation, and the practice of shutting oneself inside domestic space, respond to the insecurity of the street. They are related to the social chaos whose origin can be found in the profound crisis of those institutions in charge of maintaining and renovating sociability.

There are three positive aspects of the power acquired by television in our society in the eyes of the respondents: the sensation of reality produced by the direct image, the aperture to the world within a quotidian space, and the enabling of communication throughout the whole country. The immediateness of the direct image is valued in two senses: for its informative capacity - the direct transmission of the siege of the Palace of Justice by the M 19 or the debates of Congress are cited. That is, the possibility of having "first-hand" images that inform us of what is happening, or the positions assumed by different persons when debating decisive themes. The other sense is its participatory capacity: the direct image makes it possible for many people to "celebrate in unison", as in the Olympic games, World soccer cup, or concerts of both classical and rock music, thus creating a feeling of belonging to the game or the spectacle, with all that this type of participation has of collective catharsis, and beyond the issue that such a form of participation could be used by political powers to agglutinate people, create chauvinistic sentiments, or distract people from current problems.

With respect to television as a window to the world, the respondents insist on how forcibly enclosed Colombia has lived for so many years, and what it means for common people, to learn through television about what happens in the world: customs and problems, how cities look and what their inhabitants think, the different forms of politics, of having fun, etc. This possibility of openness is, however, partially overtaken by the hegemony of North American production in terms of poor-quality programs and the low quantity and quality of international news. But even then, television has helped enormously to open up Colombia and confront it with the world's heterogeneity. The third positive aspect of television is also in direct relation to the situation lived today in Colombia: its capacity for summoning the whole country and putting it in communication, in some way. When it ceased being a highly centralized medium, either due to the fact that programmers have slowly learnt about diversity in the country and how profitable it is to attract audiences from all regions, or through the emergence of regional television channels that bring into the medium the density of the differences of which the country is made, through soap operas or sport spectacles, documentaries or debates, it has been possible for Colombians to see themselves from one corner of the country to the other, not only in its diversified geography, but its different social classes and political points of view.

Although television appears as the medium with most weight in our society today, other media are also mentioned. The printed media are decisive due to their influence over leading political and economic groups, as the site of decisive political opinion - the power of the editorial sections of El Tiempo and El Colombiano are cited - and as the media most closely linked to groups in power. Radio is valued as the most accessible medium to the majorities in a country whose quotidian culture is scarcely permeated by the written word and is thus fundamentally oral; because of its facility for transportation and the colloquial nature of its discourse; because of the immediateness of its information and its capacity, in the last few years, to summon different cultural sectors, especially youth. The computer is valued due to the transformations that it introduces in the modes of organizing and distributing knowledge, because of the easy access to specialized information it provides, for the possibilities of working at home, for its versatility in simultaneously functioning as an instrument of systematization, experimentation and play.

The possibility of differentiating the specific weight of each medium in certain political and cultural processes that are particularly important in our society, took us to a last question, in which people were asked to correlate each medium - books, newspapers, radio, CDs, cinema, television, videocassette players, videogames, and computers- with the following events or processes: crisis of values, growth of democracy, growth of individualism, cultural diversification, family crisis, decrease in reading, loss of privacy, availability of information, widening of knowledge, growth of conformity, changes in the ways of knowing, the emergence of a new culture, and "others" in which the increase in aggressiveness and violence were cited. The results shown take into account only the three media with the strongest influence in each process, noting that various processes could be associated with the same medium and vice versa.

The value crisis is attributed by 50% of those polled to television, by 20% to cinema and 15% to videogames.
Growth of democracy: 55% newspaper, 25% the radio, 15% the book.
Growth of individualism: 50 % the videogame, 25% the computer, 20 % television.
Cultural diversity: 35% television, 35% cinema, 30% the book.
Family crisis: 60% television, 20% videogame, 15 % videocassette player.
Decrease in reading: 55% television, 32 % videogames, 10% videocassette player.
Loss of privacy: 37% television, 18% radio, 10% the computer.
Availability of information: 40 % radio, 30 % newspapers, 20% television, 10 % computers.
Widening of knowledge: 60% books, 20 % computers, 15% television.
Growth of conformity: 50% television, 15% radio, 12 % videogames.
Changes in ways of knowing: 50% books, 35% computers, 15% television.
Emergence of a new culture: 40% computers, 30% television, 2% cinema.

In the light of these answers, it is clear that what is positive - the growth of democracy, the widening of knowledge, changes in the forms of knowing - is mainly attributed to the print media - with the exception of cultural diversity, 70% of which is attributed to television and cinema and only 30% to books - while that which is negative (everything else) is charged overwhelmingly to the audiovisual media. The distrust that intellectuals have of the audiovisual sphere could not be greater! It is also interesting to note, however, that the computer is seen by the majority as something positive, even though it is "blamed" for some of the increase of individualism and the loss of privacy. However, there are no doubts about television: it is held responsible for 50 or 60 % of all that is negative: value and family crisis, increase of individualism, decrease in reading, or increase of conformity. We will deal with the reasons and effects of this mistrust that Colombian intellectuals have of audiovisual media at the end of the next section.

II. The place of culture in the media

From this point, I am using my own voice to discuss the field of Colombian media, using the knowledges of my informants as background. Even though our topic in this section is the cultural content of the media, this cannot be separated from culture's communicative nature, that is from the constitutive function that communication -its practices and media- occupies in the structure and dynamics of any social process.

1. The print media: between the modernization of formats and the anachronism of discourses

Newsprint is the medium that has inserted itself in the technological revolution, most belatedly and with the greatest amount of suspicion. The tendencies of this insertion, while reinforcing the monopoly of a few companies on written information, threaten the existence of independent journalism. It would seem that the arrival of the computer and new design technologies has made it possible for the press to compete with television: the extreme predominance of images over words in Sunday editions, the brevity of the articles, with a tendency to become even shorter and more easily digested. In turn, the changes introduced by the new technologies in the material and formal production of periodicals seriously redraw the geography of journalistic trades, implicating journalists more directly in the design of the publication while facilitating the concentration of decisions over what gets published and the weight given to each piece of information. A second line on the relations between the printed press and technological innovation is found in the electronic edition of the main newspapers and magazines of each country, allowing for the multiplication of readers both within and outside the country, and the multiplicity of modes of reading. An element that could be redefining the apocalyptically Manichean opposition between the world of writing and the image, as well as the belief in one, typographical, mode of reading.

Until relatively recent times, the ideological structure of the press was clearly partisan, linked to family ownership and management of the medium. Today newspaper companies are changing from family ownership to an entrepreneurial management, which is increasingly less political and more clearly commercial, an element reinforced by its incorporation into the world of multimedia. The most obvious example is that of the newspaper El Tiempo from Bogotá, which has had business interests in cable television since its beginnings in Colombia, is a large editorial house of magazines and books, and is the owner of a local channel for Bogotá, CityTV. We also find profound changes that introduce new networking possibilities that were reserved, until recently to television and radio. El Tiempo has daily pages in the Wall Street Journal and a weekly supplement in Time. It has editions via satellite in Cali and other cities around the country, networks in a large number of department capitals, and local versions for each city. Along with those transformations of the press, two other points are crucial: the purchase by a large conglomerate of El Espectador, -the second largest newspaper in the country in terms of readers at a national level- and, on the other hand, the accelerated transformation of newspapers into "novitiates," with television as their model. The first point affects the very essence of journalism: in inserting and adjusting the journalistic enterprise to the logics of a commercial company, the only shelters left for a minimum of independence in information tend to disappear. This is clearly present in television newscasts already.

The second profound change noted by respondents, to the Sunday newspaper, is also related to television: the predominance of the image over the written text has been taken to ludicrous extremes and the articles are brief, easily digestible, and frivolous. Meanwhile: what happened to essays and feature articles? Aside from the rhetoric and titles, what happened to investigative reporting? This raises a very serious question with regards to the late incorporation of "new technologies" to print; late in relation to radio, which was the first medium that changed technologically, and to television, which followed a few years later. Print has been the last medium to experience the onslaught of technological transformation and economic neoliberalization, and is currently immersed in a serious lack of definition of the culture of which it speaks and the way it speaks about it.

We are facing a press that presents an enormously positive face, that of the enlargement of its agenda: while for many years, print created a confusion between politics (almost always in its restricted sense; that is the politics exercised by politicians) with politicking and the official information produced by government institutions, parties, local petty powers, etc., today it has a social agenda in which the principal themes of social life, such as health, education, ecology, science and technology, have a place. Newspapers that were once ideologically fanatical, have depoliticized, in the best sense of the term: that which has ceased to confound political ideology with religious indoctrination, and makes it possible to recognize politics as the widened sphere of citizens' demands and of social movements. As with other media (but even more so), the press has been forced to look for new allies, not only in the economic sense, but in the political and social sense, due to the political sectarianism that had fed it since the last century. This is allowing the press to cover, in the name of culture, several dimensions of national life that were previously absent.
The negative face is in great measure already expressed in what has been said about the Sunday newspaper, because the changes that ostensibly and aggressively fill the Sunday pages, are also present less radically during the rest of the week. But since what I am dealing with here is cultural journalism, I am going to refer particularly to the Sunday editions. In a country where the majority is poor and semi-illiterate, the Sunday supplements have been one of the few spaces of accessible written culture for entire generations of semi-literate young people. As I have been able to confirm throughout thirty years in my university courses, the contact with what the students themselves understood as culture was realized through the Sunday supplements. In twenty years of courses on aesthetics at the Universidad del Valle, I can verify that what the immense majority of students had read about art, had been in the Sunday supplements. Students that quoted a book could be counted on the fingers of one hand. They were as few as those who had found any sort of stimulus in school for their capacities or artistic tastes. All of which makes the conversion of the Sunday supplements into hyper-visual magazines much more serious, growing with each transformation more similar to television; that is, a mixture of all, that speaks of nothing-very brief notes that can be about anything, and have absolutely no pedagogical capacity to help readers differentiate what is worthy from what is not.
If I place so much interest in the cultural rescue of Sunday supplements, it is for one reason: they are the only written medium that reaches all the country's corners at prices still accessible to a great number of Colombians. And that is something that this country does not have the right to throw away. It is true that some newspapers have culture sections within the body of the newspaper, including Sunday's. But these sections are normally limited to listing cultural information about what happens in the city, and other cities are only covered in the case of special events. Even though this information is indispensable, it is ephemeral. And the cultural life of the country needs as much or more analysis and debate: analysis that looks at culture from "the lifeworld, rather than from nostalgic currents, and respects things that information cannot respect, that is, the temporalities of culture, its own rhythms, which are so different from the compulsion to current affairs that dominates information. I am referring here to a cultural debate that is capable of relating García Márquez' literature and Botero's paintings with the culture of the weavers of San Jacinto , the community radios of the Pacific coast, or the self-built housing projects of Aguablanca . A debate that helps us to understand the cultures that feed the violence we live, and the forms of violence suffered by our different cultures.
Another important dimension of the new presence of culture(s) in the press is a literal explosion of journals. An explosion that is, in the first place, a diversification of weekly information or analysis: next to news journals such as Semana, today we find Cambio, Cromos, and the resurrected Alternativa. In the second place, we are currently undergoing the emergence of numerous cultural journals, produced from very different cultural currents and with a surprising quality in terms of both content and form, such as Número, La Hoja (de Medellín), el Malpensante, Kineitoscopio, Gaceta, and Viceversa. Journals among which there are some that are the work of one or two people, but others that have behind them a group with a sociocultural or citizenship-education project that is well-defined. Among newspapers of cultural information, the journal Suburbia, which is free, is one of the best expressions of this new type of journalism. In the third place, we find journals that search for the recognition of social actors or cultural processes that are ambiguous and clearly problematic for the "establishment", such as Acento about homosexuals and Mujer, monthly journal of Cambio, 91.9, which is dedicated to non-conventional music, from the classically venerable to the metallicaly young. Finally, we have university journals- from the Universidad de Antioquia, Universidad del Valle, Universidad Nacional, Universidad Central, to mention a few- that are letting go the predominance of academic discourse in questioning the relationship between universities and society. This translates into a search for mediating themes and experimentation with new discourses that can involve not only colleagues, but the country's "critical mass".

2. Radio: between the instantaneous and the communal

Radio is the medium that most rapidly registers transformations introduced by technological modernization, making it flexible in a double sense. FM lightens the apparati and diminishes the costs, making possible a great diversification of the types of radio stations on the dial, even ones with the same owner. This is because the radio system has developed such that certain stations are entirely dedicated to particular genres or themes - music or news- and targeted at precise audience segments in terms of either taste or age. On the other hand, satellite connection has created the possibility of instantaneous news from any part of the world, which will eventually lead towards more ductile programs, more easily structured modules, in which a great variety of sub-genres can fit and in which it is easy to insert "live news." Supported by the first type of flexibility, a new generation of local and community radio stations is emerging through which local or barrio social movements and NGOs see the possibility of a new public space: not one in which they are "represented," but rather acknowledged through their own languages and narratives.
The radio has played a decisive cultural role in Colombia. In a "country of countries" this medium has given people from the provinces -even in the most remote regions of the country- the daily experience of being part of the nation, the conversion of the idea of the nation into a feeling and a daily reality. On the other hand, radio has been a mediator, between the expressive and symbolic nature of the orality of rural cultures, and the rational and instrumental nature of urban modernity.
Radio provided the first national network of information in Colombia. Even though this has permitted the communication of the country in two directions - from the center to the regions and vice versa- it has almost always acted in one direction only: that which follows the centralist model of state administration. The early privatization of radio, its deregulation and "liberation" from state tutelage, was however, not useful in reverting the hegemonic configuration of the national, but rather played a role in the hyper-mercantilization of that medium. There has been an identification between instant information and high ratings, with the latter linked to greater commercial value. This element is translated into the imposition of that format to any discourse or topic. Maybe it is due to that early (market) "freedom" in Colombian radio, that the country can take pride in having one of the most modern radio systems in Latin America, in technological and informative terms, although it arrived late to community radio, despite the pioneering experience of Radio Sutatenza. At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, mining radio in Bolivia and campesino radio in Guatemala are examples of radio made from the regions, from the small town, from the local, a mode that Colombia lacked.
From the above elements, it is possible to delineate the most important features of the transformation in the modes of presence of the cultural in radio. On the one hand, we find that what is defined as "cultural programming" in commercial radio is almost always limited to Sundays, to art and literature, and to interviews with the usual "figures of culture." What we find there is the traditional, restricted notion of culture which, on those occasions in which it can widen its content, continues to be marked and imprisoned by the language that is taken as "cultured." In my view, the first dimension of changes is situated in youth radio stations: next to the pioneering and historical HJCK in Bogotá, or the younger station, Carvajal in Cali. The emergence of university radio stations in almost all the country's major cities, marks the appearance of the mediatic presence of the cultural as a new type of educational project that has been slowly taking form in the last few years. This long-term project of transformation of the relations between radio, society, and culture has music at its center. But this music does not exhaust itself either in a type of music that is already legitimate (like classical music) nor in fashion (which is what happens to youth FM radio stations) but rather constructs a new public agenda of the cultural, in which it is possible to fit the very diverse cultures and languages of which this country is made: traditional as well as contemporary, and national as well as regional, local, and transnational.
The second transformation is constituted by community radio. As I stated before, we made a late arrival to this type of radio in Colombia, but today it represents a splendid movement of cultural recognition and social participation that is receiving the support of the recent Ministry of Culture. It is as if in the different levels of society and the state, the conscience of the possibilities of renovation of political culture through this medium, was growing. What is becoming visible in community radios is the new sense that the relations between culture and politics acquire when local or barrio social movements assume radio as a public space, a element which makes it possible to be not represented but recognized: to ensure that their own voice, with its own languages and narratives, is heard. Feminist movements, gays, NGOs, or community associations look for the right of expression in the radio, the right to be taken into account not through delegation, but through their own selves. A second element that should be pointed out in terms of cultural production and appropriation in community radios is the recuperation of oral cultures, their modes of saying and narrating, which are those of the immense majority, in a country which, even if people learned how to read, they do not read, because they do not have the economic possibilities, or because it takes a tremendous effort or both things at the same time. And where schooling takes the luxury of ignoring most of the country's oral narratives because the only narratives that are legitimated by the school - as well as valued so as to being given a price by the Ministry of Culture - are indigenous narratives, previous to their translation, of course, to a written text.
In the third place, and although this may sound scandalous, one of the radio phenomenon that, despite its ambiguity, is most interesting, is that of FM musical stations: Radioactiva, La Mega, Super 98.9, Todelar Estéreo, Veracruz in Medellín. Although these stations are entirely commercial, they are becoming places of encounter, real or virtual, for many young people. Radio today is the only medium that addresses youth as such and recognizes them as protagonists of a cultural and musical space, and through it, calls them forth. The business in these stations is big and the corruption is multiple. However what takes place culturally in these stations is part of the ambiguity presented by contemporary social and cultural processes. In having as its axis generational music, that which has turned into the idiom of the young - beyond its good or bad quality- FM music stations are a medium through which young people are trying to say things to the country in an informal and provocative style drawn from their jargons and stereotypes, from their modes of conceiving humor-even rudeness and obscenity. As stated by Ana María Lalinde in one of the few interpretations that have known how to read the ambiguous discourse of these stations, they are building publics through a new type of host - the disk jockey- who generates interlocutors. More than speaking to the young, this interlocutor speaks for the young and like them. This type of radio is not only proposing new communication models but already has a history in this country that begins in the sixties with Radio 15, El Club del Clan, etc; those radio stations that were the first in exasperating adults and charming adolescents.

3. Television: technological renovation and cultural displacement / disorientation

Regarding the influence of technological changes in the transformation of television, I shall point out, in synthetic form, only those changes that have social and political relevance. New technologies multiply, in every country, the presence of global images and intensify the globalization of the images of the local. But at the same time, democratization movements from below find in technology - of production as in the portable camera, of reception as in parabolic antennae, of postproduction as the computer, of diffusion such as cable- the possibility of multiplying the images of our society, starting from the regional or municipal level, or even from the barrio. Even though for the great majority of critics, the second movement cannot be compared to the first, due to inequality in the forces at play, I think that undervaluing the convergence of technological transformations and new forms of citizenship -something which Walter Benjamin would anticipate in his solitude, analyzing the relations between cinema and the emergence of the urban masses- can only lead us to a blind return to the Manicheism that for years has paralyzed the view and the action of the immense majority of left-wing groups in the field of communications. Of course the sense of the local in cable television varies enormously, from commercial to profoundly communal orientations. But in many cases, new actors take form through these new modes of communication that connect - and redesign- what the global offers, via parabolic antennae or cable with local demands. We also find, regarding the new modes of television, another sphere of contradictions that needs to be taken into account: the staging of that which is Latin American, which, schematized and deformed, but also charged with polyphonies, is being realized by the Latin subsidiaries of CNN and CBS in countries frequently immersed in a very poor presence of international news, especially regarding Latin American countries. The decontextualization and frivolities that make up a large content of the news broadcast by those networks, cannot hide the aperture and the informative contrast made possible by them because, in the crossing of images and words, imaginaries are unmade and remade, and in relocating the local, they situate us in a certain Latin American space.
The other dimension of the transformations that is crucial for understanding what is currently happening to television in Colombia, is its late arrival in processes of privatization and their peculiar configuration. The mixed model that has developed in television in Colombia -despite all the political interference from different governments and the permanent absence of a real politics in programming- allowed the existence of many small and medium-sized companies that, in their own way, made possible a pluralization of views on the country. It is this pluralization, so treacherously and constantly questioned in the last few years by the great economic groups, that is today in danger with the appearance of private channels and the privatization suffered by those channels that are still called public. To this radical change, and taking into account the current tendencies in telecommunicative globalization, we can add the complete explosion of the television spectrum due to two main factors. On the one hand, there has been the birth of local commercial channels and a semi-privatization of public channels; and on the other, the growth of the number of regional channels that is accompanied, also, by the blurring and increasing contradictory management of Señal Colombia, the public cultural channel that has national coverage, as well as by the difficult but unstoppable process of legalization of community channels.
The current cultural panorama in television is quite thin. In commercial channels, culture is scheduled during hours of low ratings; that is, in mid-morning, or after eleven p.m. Culture can only gain a place within the most expensive schedule - between seven and ten p.m.- by transforming itself to suit the affected mix of the magacines. In mid-morning or midnight programs, culture is treated as artistic news, with little information, and much less cultural debate. Almost always, these programs identity culture with the arts, and the latter with their provincial star system. These are programs made to produce more reverential consumers of ART, rather than educating active spectators and critics, and they never seek to stimulate the desire to create art itself. The presence of culture in these magazines is treated, without the minimal modesty, as the strawberry that crowns the cake in which they mix the sweetened smile of the model - presenters, mini-interviews with ministers and politicians, pseudo-spontaneous street surveys about how many people still go to church on Sundays, supposedly erotic video clips, and two or three thirty-five second reviews of best-selling books. Submitted to such distortion, cultural information disfigures the very sphere it names. Ultimately, in commercial channels, one has to look for cultural analysis from that dimension that really peers in at the country: the drama series. There is much more "country," and much more cultural analysis, in drama series such as La Alternativa del Escorpión, Sueños y Espejos, Señora Isabel, and La Mujer del Presidente, than in the newscasts or so-called cultural programs. Previously, the only source of worthwhile cultural programming on commercial television was Audiovisuales, a public prdocuer to which we owe investigative series such as Yurupary, Palabra Mayor, and Travesías.
At the national level, Señal Colombia is the only authentically public, cultural channel. Although what we find can be something different. In the mornings and first hours of the afternoon, we find "educative programming" - a mix of things whose educative value is still to be seen-structured with no relation whatsoever to the "cultural programming" of the prime-time schedule, called La Franja. This is the programming that takes place between nine thirty p.m. and midnight, and in which we find a proposal that is built on the best that Channel 11 had produced for several years and regional cultural production. It presents the most coherent cultural programming that Colombian television has had. However, the three hours of La Franja do not meet the right of the country to have, not a few hours -in a schedule that excludes a great number of Colombians that cannot watch television at that time because they have to rise very early to go to work- but a channel entirely dedicated to producing images that express the large and wide variety of Colombian and world cultures. It is true that La Franja represents an enormous step forward in cultural terms for the country, but Colombia still lacks a channel dedicated to culture and a network capable of linking regional and local channels and inserting itself in an educational project as a whole. Different institutions and groups, NGOs, and national and local cultural associations will have to demand their rights to the National Television Commission so that the Ministries of Culture, Communication and Education can elaborate, with these associations and institutions of civil society, a real project of an independent cultural channel, with the autonomy enjoyed by channels such as TV-Cultura from Brazil or Channel 22 in Mexico.
Regional channels are going through a very difficult moment that is due not only to the appearance of private national and local channels, but also because they have, in either small or great measure, lost their sense of public and cultural channels, as was stated in the statute with which they were born. If for a period of time, regional channels fulfilled their mission allowing peoples from the different regions - Antioquia,Valle, Caribbean Coast- to see themselves, for the first time on television, recognize themselves in their modes of speaking, in their rhythms, landscapes, and musics, lately regional channels have reduced the cultural to a few programs on folklore, almost always cheap documentaries, and the regional to informative news. The rest is limited to imitating poorly what the commercial channels are doing. There is very little research on the cultural transformation taking place in the regions, and too much provincial narcissism. And thus, they are losing the possibility of confronting the galloping privatization of television. Either these channels make a radical reformulation of their structure and remake their public and cultural character in a project that can make them into promoters of cultural and educational regional development, searching for financial support in regional development programs, or they are condemned to die.
With regards to community channels, they have existed in Colombia for years and number approximately seven hundred, with the precarious existence that their status as pirate channels allows them. But it is very significant, in terms of presenting a different type of television, that one of the first of these community channels was born in the most forgotten and poorest places of the national territory, Istmina, Chocó, in 1989. These channels express the diversity that social movements have today in their struggle to construct public spaces from which they can express themselves and participate, from the base, in the construction of the country. They represent a lifeline for the renovation of cultural politics in the municipalities and barrios. But they still have a long way to go to acquire not only a legal existence but also equal terms regarding opportunities.
* * * *

It is possible to foresee that the way the media are relating to their publics/audiences is going to constitute a decisive scenario of change-that is, the cultural transformation of the masses into a segmented culture. This responds to the way media industries have been able to assume that the public or the audience does not designate an undifferentiated and passive entity, but rather a strong source of diversity in terms of taste and ways of consuming. In the last few years, the media call forth and construct audiences that, although massive in terms of the amount of people that are addressed, cannot be considered massive in terms of uniformity or simultaneity of reception. This forces us to recast any view that identifies mediatic culture with homogenization. Of course there is homogenization in our society, but more than an effect of the media, this is a quality of the market in general, while current modes of cultural production in the media are leading towards fragmentation and specialization of offers and consumption.
The construction of audiences, an element that has played a democratizing role in society since the printed press in the nineteenth century in opening cultural and informative goods to sectors different from the elite, has an ambiguous character today. If the segmentation of the public continues to have a democratizing role to a certain extent - as in the case of music radio stations that pay attention to the demands of different age groups and different cultural tastes- we are nevertheless facing a fragmentation of programming that appropriates knowledge of socio-cultural differences to serve commercial interests; that is, it tends to construct only saleable differences.
On the other hand, the major risk that culture faces today in the media is the state of becoming an object that is as rapidly obsolete as any other type of mercantile product. Cultural life, however, feeds as much on memory as on invention, on sedimentation as on imagination of the future, on rhythms that cannot be governed by the compulsion to current affairs. There is a strong contradiction between the temporal logics of the market and the temporal logics of cultures. We therefore need a type of journalism that can construct and defend a plurality of discourses in which cultures can breathe, can tell each other about their continuity and permanence as well as transformation and rupture.
Finally, it is through the dynamics of culture that we have one of the few forms of facing the multiplicity of violences that are tearing apart Colombia. Two researchers from Bogotá, in a long-term study on quotidian violence at home and school, conclude their work by uncovering that in the depth of our violence, we find an enormous and constant repression - from children to old people - of creativity. And in this respect, the new Constitution of 1991 falls short. Because in it, we clearly find the right to access to the culture that already exists, but nothing is said about the rights of all to cultural creativity. And people, in order to survive and more so to live together, need as much of the culture that already exists as of that culture that each one of us can create. This much we know from processes of interpretation, of the kind undertaken by my informants, and through academic meta-reflection.

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