Crear y controlar una sociedad de comunicación. La emergencia de una nueva preocupación gubernamental a mediados del siglo xx

Our perspective combines Communication Studies and Governmentality Studies—that is, those studies which, starting from Foucault's thesis that Modernity can be interpreted as a process of increasing politicization of life, seek to identify the political rationalities and technologies that aim to guide the behavior of populations. Between the 1930s and 1950s, there was an explosion in technical research on messages, media, audiences, and effects that has not yet been adequately incorporated into the narrative of biopolitics. In these pages, we aspire to continue addressing this gap by interpreting the archive of the field of Communication Studies as a theoretical-political corpus. What, for example, was the role of Mass Communication Research in the politics of life? Our main hypothesis is the following: towards the middle of the 20th century, partly in response to the population surge driven by a new technological cycle, the medico-sociological concerns that had driven the formation of modern European states around the 18th century began to be superseded by a new governmental question: how to create and control a communication society? Within this framework, a set of knowledge and techniques from mass communication were directed towards and succeeded in influencing not only audience behavior, but also the production of infrastructure.