Popular and alternative communication, digital capitalism and post-truth

Abstract

The current context of digital capitalism leads us to the analysis of numerous spaces we inhabit, as well as traditions and conceptual journeys from the beginnings of the new Latin American democracies in the 1980s and their later projections; as for example from the conception of posttruth, which, from a discursive space allows us to understand the popular configuration in the current context. Here, we understand popular and alternative communication, which was historically composed for the understanding, deepening and visibility of marginalized sectors of civil society, as currents that are also reinvented and seek to adapt to this new context. From mainly Latin American authors (Alfaro Moreno, 2000; Díaz Bordenave, 1981, 1989; Dussel, 1985; García Canclini, 1983, 1989; Graziano, 1980; Kaplún, 2002; Mata, 2006; Pasquali, 1996), we aim not only to expose the context of Latin America from digital capitalism with its variant of post-truth, but also to situate ourselves in a popular and alternative space that historically sought to empower these marginalized sectors not from comparison, but from the positivity of their own discourses and local practices. Although the popular and alternative perspective are constrained by a hegemonic structure, we can see that it does not prevent the development of communication alternatives that we seek to show. We refer with communicational alternatives to certain experiences that have strategies for structural social change and/or that are not framed in transnational power structures (Simpson Grimberg, 1986).