Presentación

• Rafael Larez Puche

  Universidad Nacional Experimental Rafael María Baralt, Venezuela.

Contemporary societies are currently witnessing a new way of establishing consensus, opinions, and agreements in politics; that is, new tools for building hegemony and seizing political power. These practices focus on the mass control of information and the dominance of “truth.” For the latter, political actors have found the media—those who control the “news”—to be the main operators of their projects, understanding that today, to survive in the political arena, it is essential to build media power.

The media possess the main force of intervention in the socio-cultural dynamics of the contemporary world. The information society project has experienced its rise and consolidation in recent decades due to the advancement and expansion of the digital system, generating a kind of technological dependency. It is a global reality that the media are part of monopolies, elites, and families who, in the twentieth century, had the opportunity to build “media power” due to their affinities or close ties with the political power of the time.

While television consolidated its position as the most widely used medium of communication, social consensus and public opinion depended on the editorial lines constructed within opinion programs, news broadcasts, and coverage of specific political actors, convenient for media power. This practice has intensified in digital media, causing the selection of content and discursive frameworks to be subject to whoever is behind the media outlet and its political and ideological aims. Subjectivity has been transformed through the media into "objective constructions of information" when political, social, and cultural scenarios are shaped through them.

Approaching the social sciences and humanities from the traditional topics of interpretation in contemporary times would be merely an intention with many limitations and shortcomings. This is why, in Encuentros and in this edition, works are presented that interpret current phenomena from a comprehensive perspective and with results expressed from a multifactorial standpoint. Education, public administration, science, and politics cannot be addressed today without considering the virtual phenomenon that permeates and shapes them toward new methods and forms of development. The world of the "digital" and the "artificial" is gaining ground, and the social sciences are at risk of losing their interpretive and problem-solving capacity.

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