Mediación y mediatización de la comunicación pública. Una perspectiva pragmática

Abstract

We explore here a pragmatic perspective of the Public Sphere (PS), from which we see the PS as the space built by communicative actions and interactions around public issues and problems. In order to comprehend the new PS, which is more open and unstable than ever, we must study the mediation-mediatization processes in which “social problems” are transformed into “public problems”, as well as the ways in which the interests, perspectives and solution proposals of the actors interested in common problems are discussed in the controversies within the various central or peripheral PS.The PS has to be understood as a space of two-waymediation mediatization (connection and transformation) between citizenship, common world and institutional-political order. To participate in this mediator, the PS, requires to recognize its qualities as: a) an articulation of public arenas or scenarios; b) a space for controversy, recognition and power; c) a space for inscription, memory and shared temporality; d) and as an institutional space. The institutionalization of certain values, which allow for the opinion to become a fourth estate or “fourth power”, guarantees a minimum of quality to that sphere and to democracy itself.