The construction of the collective imaginary and its influence on public opinion, showing how, from the psychology and sociology of communication, agendas, far from being determined by institutions and / or organizations, such as the government, political and economic groups, are subject to a dynamics shared with the instability of the masses. We will try to sketch, only by way of an approximation, some implications that range from public opinion to the control of the masses, from the democracy of being able to participate, to participation in legitimization and its institutional games.. (Peñuela and García. 2006).
The news agendas
What is an agenda? We can generally say that it is a shared collection of issues, used by communicators, as institutional representatives (state or private), and as some social actors we assume that others want (assumptions) / should (imperatives) know, with this conjecture we build the informative itineraries. But this is nothing more than an illusion because what is behind this is the desire to manipulate public opinion by determining (issue / omission) the issues being debated, it is a political and institutional power game. Thus, political, media and public agendas are defined. (Sampedro. 2002)
The true exercise of power (Reese. 1992), consists of defining and ranking the issues that debate public opinion.
These issues become the initiative of the government or the opposition (political agendas), in media content (media agenda) and in matters that occupy citizens (public agenda).As each of us, politicians, the media and the public write down and order in their agenda the issues to be dealt with, according to their priorities.
The information that is desired is known, it is placed in a speech with writing, visualization (image) and subsequent symbolic construction, the most suitable actors are sought, and the strategies necessary to obtain the desired effect, this configures a progressive information agenda to the public.
These agendas are intended to give the collective conscience a factual assumption about an agenda of social spaces-themes in which to think (should think), although we naively believe that people are told to think (Gómez, 2002), conception of a representation acted by and for the group involved in the information and its context. Thus, the information agendas group imaginary in a discursive presentation typical of the media, there they configure the contexts in which they want to intervene and of which they want to be known, informed and thought. Little by little we will advance on this topic.
The imaginary. The collective. The social order
Imaginary
The possible worlds, those in which the subjects move and unfold, are configurations of the images that culture has left as an imprint and the way in which they themselves recreate the marking of that one over and over again. We represent ourselves in the other, we identify with him, we want to know him, apprehend him, steal his image. Thus, from the moment we are born, we attend the communion produced by contact with our fellow men through the groups that we form and participate in, be they religious, political, academic, cultural or family.
Then, the imaginary ones, are part of the complex of representations of a subject, they configure it to "image and similarity of their neighbor" or in other cases to complete dissimilarity. Thus, the imaginary register is sown in the fertile land of its passions, of the primary, of the labile, but it is there, where its Achilles heel is located. The same register brings him closer to prejudice, to excessive action, to the arid impulse of "I act then I think", to compulsion, it is there where there is precisely the ferocity, the manifest and latent aggressiveness that we perceive in the conflict. «The main illusions of the imaginary are those of totality, synthesis, autonomy, duality and above all similarity. So the imaginary is of the order of the superficial appearances that are the observable, deceptive phenomena,and that they hide underlying structures; affects are phenomena of this type ”(Evans, 1997). And from this contemporary everyday life has given us enough illustration.
Imaginary, from the Latin imaginarius, connotes the meaning of apparent, illusory, but this allusion is far from being innocuous, since its effects are often devastating. The ferocity is unleashed, the run-run circulates and the generated dynamics are unstable. The opinion, far from enrolling in a reflective exercise is a snag effect that crowds audiences. The certainties appear and in a moment, we are full of daily "political analysts" (in the case of the political agenda) in every café, in every meeting. Permeated, then, with the images they show us, we build the prejudices that we debate. Hence the importance of public opinion, hence his desire to control it, to manipulate its orientations, hence the affects and effects on the social order.
To pass from the image that is superimposed, to the word that it articulates, (it is one of the possible paths of the communicative act) the ultimate meaning of every communicative act, as an opinion; conjecture analyzed, ethical possibility. When the information is imagined, it becomes manipulative, represents, acts on the subject and in his reading of the world and influences his action. The imaginary ones are part of the structure of the collective due to the position of the symbolic attribution that the subject lends to the media discourse and to the way in which it reconstructs, very reluctantly, the meanings in the group or collective to which it is directed, its target audiences. The transition from the imaginary to the symbolic is the true exercise of opinion, of analysis, no matter who does it, it will always be an individual exercise, objectified in the collective consensus (agreed intersubjectivity).There the true opinion arises, less weak than its predecessor only built by imaginary. The symbolic articulates new possibilities of representation and re-signification that recreate the subject and what he thinks of in a dynamic process of attribution of meanings and shared meanings, endows him with possibilities of existence, mediation, in other words it makes it reasonable. And since the imaginary ones are not innocuous, that they are unstable, manipulable and random in the action of the collective, our responsibility is ethical. The important thing is to always keep in mind the implications of collective human behavior and the determination to know when to retire. This is always forgotten in the immediacy of work, sometimes and sometimes it is omitted in the institutional game of the media.less weak than its imaginary-only predecessor. The symbolic articulates new possibilities of representation and re-signification that recreate the subject and what he thinks of in a dynamic process of attribution of meanings and shared meanings, endows him with possibilities of existence, mediation, in other words it makes it reasonable. And since the imaginary ones are not innocuous, that they are unstable, manipulable and random in the action of the collective, our responsibility is ethical. The important thing is to always keep in mind the implications of collective human behavior and the determination to know when to retire. This is always forgotten in the immediacy of work, sometimes and sometimes it is omitted in the institutional game of the media.less weak than its imaginary-only predecessor. The symbolic articulates new possibilities of representation and re-signification that recreate the subject and what he thinks of in a dynamic process of attribution of meanings and shared meanings, endows him with possibilities of existence, mediation, in other words it makes it reasonable. And since the imaginary ones are not innocuous, that they are unstable, manipulable and random in the action of the collective, our responsibility is ethical. The important thing is to always keep in mind the implications of collective human behavior and the determination to know when to retire. This is always forgotten in the immediacy of work, sometimes and sometimes it is omitted in the institutional game of the media.The symbolic articulates new possibilities of representation and re-signification that recreate the subject and what he thinks of in a dynamic process of attribution of meanings and shared meanings, endows him with possibilities of existence, mediation, in other words it makes it reasonable. And since the imaginary ones are not innocuous, that they are unstable, manipulable and random in the action of the collective, our responsibility is ethical. The important thing is to always keep in mind the implications of collective human behavior and the determination to know when to retire. This is always forgotten in the immediacy of work, sometimes and sometimes it is omitted in the institutional game of the media.The symbolic articulates new possibilities of representation and re-signification that recreate the subject and what he thinks of in a dynamic process of attribution of meanings and shared meanings, endows him with possibilities of existence, mediation, in other words it makes it reasonable. And since the imaginary ones are not innocuous, that they are unstable, manipulable and random in the action of the collective, our responsibility is ethical. The important thing is to always keep in mind the implications of collective human behavior and the determination to know when to retire. This is always forgotten in the immediacy of work, sometimes and sometimes it is omitted in the institutional game of the media.
