Articulo_5_EN_Doxa_27

to be put into context to be consumed by different publics. In addition to the population’s low educational levels, the strategies of manipulation that include spectacular techniques used by broadcasters, its justified existence in the culture of fear and the flood of information instead of informing disorientate, among other things.

Technological devices facilitate access to information and its serialisation, allowing individuals to appropriate its characteristics, including making value judgments that when incorporated into cultural baggage, could be used as a reference when judging reality or even when making political decisions. This occurs even when judgments are far from reality or are not based on weighty arguments because the individual can disarticulate or invisibilise them.

Although information about the conflict is part of Colombians’ daily life and many of the events take place near their homes, a large part of the population can abstain from what is happening, due to the media’s scheduling of the conflict. The degree of attention and the importance that the audience should give to the events is determined by the media; as a result, parties identify with stances the media present, creating a scheme in which conflict feeds the media’s messages, which in turn feed social elaborations and individuals’ cultural baggage.

The spectacular treatment of the conflict by the Colombian media has it a product of a specific time, in which the economic success of the messages related to it are easily commercialised in the international media market, eager for stories that astonish audiences. Although international audiences receive unpublished stories on a daily basis, they still demand novel ones, which Colombia has been continuously supplying since the nineties. These messages have a short lifespan and are quickly replaced by others that are equally spectacular. Since they have an ahistorical dimension, but which momentarily satisfies a receiver attracted to the eye-catching nature of these stories, audiences have a low criticality towards them and are faced with the impossibility of building memory.

The media’s spectacularisation of the incidents of the Colombian conflict has guided the audiences’ attention towards the emotional, using tools such as reiteration, inundation, as well as the technical quality of production, which can alter the final view of what happened and its gravity. All of this results in subjects upholding these versions in their daily lives, making them see their reality as something coherent and decreasing their capacity to take action.

One of the elements that have allowed the spectacularisation of the Colombian conflict is the iconicity 10 of the images that it generates, facilitating media’s use of it and the fixation on individuals, even in culturally different environments. These narratives presented globally as spectacular show how Colombians appropriate their reality and recent history. The spectacular image can guarantee a place in individual and collective imaginaries, which depends not only on individuals but also on the media’s intentionality, which can predict which of these will be more successful or create floods of heterogenous information about a situation so that, in the end, it can be trivialised.

In Colombia, the media use the incidents of the conflict as raw material to feed different channel’s programming, transforming them into serialised content in news and fiction formats. In particular, the mass acceptance of the latter has given rise to literary and television “genres” exported as Narcoliterature and Narcotelevision, respectively. These contents

10 Images such as those of Ingrid Betancourt’s in captivity, Pablo Escobar, armed and camoflauged guerrillas have iconic characteristics.