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Communication as a Power Factor:
Communication as a Power Factor: There is a very well-known Spanish
professor at the University of Berkeley in California named Manuel
Castells, which postulates that the form of power lies in the ability to
shape the mind and that coercion alone cannot entrench dominance. In
this era plagued by governments that use force to dominate their people,
it seems pertinent to study power by taking away for an instant the
capacity for violence that it always has. By studying the "information
society". Castells makes us see that the ability to achieve consent is
fundamental to power relations. So then we move completely away from
the discussion of power and domination by accepting that power is
relational, while domination is institutional.
Power relations are built, always according to Castells, in the mind
through the processes of communication. The researcher arrives more
deeply in his reflection, wondering if these hidden connections could be
the source code of the human condition. That may be so, and to
complicate matters even more, here comes an additional concept of
horizontal networks which allows mass self communication, turning all
users into message emitters, or information content providers. This
approach gives much more power to society, because of the use of
communication networks so difficult to control by the power and
institutions of the State. Another researcher of cognitive linguistics at
the same university, George Lakoff, finds in his research that the human
mind is activated by accessing the maps of the brain by means of the
language used and claims that our brain thinks with metaphors, and
that through metaphors narratives are constructed. In looking for
current examples of these metaphors, it is evident to think of everyday
stories such as the economic blockade, the foreign invasion or the
attempted coup d'état, This is what all Latin American governments in
distress are doing through the mass media under their control.