Vol 3, No 6 (2005): January-June

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.

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.

El propósito de esta ponencia es presentar, desde una lógica reconstructiva, la vía o los caminos seguidos en el caso de la investigación El discurso del comunicador corporativo. Se trata, en definitiva, de un ejercicio de retroducción o mirada retrospectiva más cercana a la lógica analítica y detectivesca que a la lógica sintética que, sin lugar a dudas, nos es más habitual. Advirtiendo que la construcción de una memoria tiene mucho de fabulación, se intentará un relato que muestre lo que podría denominarse “el lado oscuro de la ciencia” en el sentido de privilegiar los tropiezos y las encrucijadas que inevitablemente conlleva la actividad investigativa, máxime cuando nos enfrentamos a un material tan complejo y problemático como lo es el análisis de las prácticas discursivas.
Dado que el objeto fundamental de la investigación que nos ocupa era el funcionamiento de la práctica discursiva del comunicador que se desempeña en el ámbito corporativo, la perspectiva teórico-metodológica que resultaba más coherente era la del Análisis del Discurso. Este enfoque –podría decirse que por regla general– acude para el análisis de los textos o los discursos (en su sentido amplio) a los procesos hermenéuticos y abductivos en consonancia con las posibilidades que éstos ofrecen para establecer relaciones significativas.

There is a relationship between social cognition and the conversational structures of discourse; the
analysis of beliefs systems, -upon getting to the bottom of those structure used to formulate explanations
over their functions and cognitive, social, political, historical, and cultural contexts; does not only encircle
the study of the discursive expression, but also the reproduction of ideology to which this latter belongs
and represents. Furthermore, the conversational structures used in any discourse are influenced by the
individual social practices and reflect the mental model of he who carries it out.
Based on these elements, an analysis over the beliefs system was carried out parting from the articles
that were published around Colom bian President’s, Álvaro Uribe Vélez›s, speech before the United
Nations’ General assembly in New York, on September, 29th, 2004. The analysis attempts to compare
the factual as well as the evaluative beliefs systems that are present in those articles published by
various newspaper to outline that speech. Seven articles constitute the sample, including the speech
transcription. After the reading, some primary conclusions are presented in regards to the manipulation
of factual beliefs (knowledge) in order to generate evaluative beliefs (opinions);b). the function of implicit
exhortatory speech acts; and the relationship between the newspaper’s ideology and that of the journalists.