Democràcia i comunicació: de la inherència a l'anomalia

Abstract

This article compares the main concepts of Greek direct democracy with the current situation of representative democracy in Western societies, taking as a reference the idea of communicative distance in the political sense. The connections between democracy and communication were already present, for example, in the concept of isegoria. However, the relationship of inherence between the two concepts has undergone a great transformation with the arrival of the era of mass communication. The cornerstone of Athenian democracy, recast by theoreticians of liberalism in the 19th century in the form of representative democracy, has often been undermined by the mass media themselves. The media have gone from acting as a counterbalance to power, shaped for and by the people, to being lucrative companies of immense size which are largely not answerable to society or even to the regulatory role of the State.