The proposal of GT Political Economy of Information, Communication and Culture (EPICC) It fills a gap within the pre-existing CLACSO Working Groups. Addressing problems from this theoretical and methodological perspective is crucial for tackling the reconfiguration of regional communication and political landscapes, and enables work on theoretical problems and economic, public policy, and regulatory analyses in an aggregated manner.

There is a geography and academic-political trajectories that allow us to speak of a Latin American EPICC (Educational and Political Science Studies) oriented towards the unification of a field and the assertion of a specificity from which the construction of its own situated paradigm is promoted (Bolaño, 1988 and 2000; Ramos, 2014; Rodriguez, Olivera and Saladrigas, 2017; Monje et al., 2017). Within this framework, diverse particularities and asymmetries are recognized, but also commonalities, which contribute to enriching the comparative studies to be developed (Saladrigas, Olivera and Paz 2017; Gerber, Brant and Mastrini, 2017; De Charras, 2018; Beltramelli, 2018).

The Latin American tradition in this area originates from multiple fronts and stems from a dialogue with the continent's intellectual tradition, including theories of imperialism and cultural dependency, but also with the entire body of Latin American structuralism, sociology, education, and the entire political and economic debate on development and underdevelopment (Muraro, 1987). Its formation reflects a multiplicity of innovative approaches, which gradually coalesce into a unified school through their shared immersion in the Latin American debate and critical thought of the 70s and 80s. From the 90s onward, important traditions were established in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile,[1] and progress was made toward their institutionalization.[2]

The link between communication and economics had its challenges in Latin America, as it inherently raised questions about the economic subordination between these countries and the developed world. The postwar models promoted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), especially the one focused on Import Substitution Industrialization, were closely linked to functionalist social theory, which hindered early critical reflection.

The evolution of the theoretical articulation between communication and economics in Latin America progressed from an initial dialogue between development theory and social communication to the later integration of dependency theory and the interpretation of underdevelopment. Conceptions of the transnational corporation and economic interpretations of cultural dependency were added. In addition to the critique of dependency theory, the field became more complex with successive “new technologies” (Muraro, 1987), which, through digitization, converged into current modes of information and communication aggregation.

While the link between communication, information, culture, and economics is central to defining the identity of the EPICC field of study, so too, on another level of analysis, are the power relations upon which the relationship between the State and a country's media system is structured. The articulation of economic and political analyses leads to reflection on National Communication Policies and, more broadly, on Regional Communication Policies (Becerra, 2015; Monje, 2019).

We also acknowledge the contributions of other fields of knowledge such as law (Loreti and Lozano 2014), political philosophy (Monje, 2018), and political science, which have addressed aspects related to the design of communication policies. For this reason, our studies bring together, with varying emphases and levels of complexity, debates on rights, comparative legislation analysis, reflections on power (De Charras and Galup 2018), public space, and the democratization of communications (Fraiman, Rossi, and Lázaro, 2017; Segura and Waisbord, 2016).

Communication policies, as public policies, were gradually incorporated into the national projects of Latin American countries starting in the 1950s and gained a place on the international agenda in the 1970s in supranational organizations such as UNESCO and in meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement. Although these developments were staggered, they ultimately yielded fruitful results from the moment academia and political action converged in Latin America in the 1970s (a process that was partially revived in the early 21st century).

The field of communication policy studies in Latin America, then called the sociopolitics of communication, developed a dense network based on the reflections, categories, and analyses produced by intellectuals such as Juan Somavia, Luis Ramiro Beltrán, Antonio Pasquali, Rafael Roncagliolo, Margarita Graziano, Héctor Schmucler, Diego Portales, Fernando Reyes Matta, Raquel Salinas Bascur, Elizabeth Fox, Gonzaga Motta, and Nelly Camargo, among others, in ongoing dialogue and collaboration with European and North American colleagues such as Cees Hamelink, Armand Mattelart, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and Herbert Schiller. Numerous colleagues from the Global South and North America, on both sides of the Atlantic, continued this exchange (Herscovici, 1999; Monje, 2019).

During the last fifteen years of the 20th century, even though the international debate had matured significantly and could have been geared toward transforming the situations of concentration and dependency that were being denounced, EPICC studies were marginalized from academic agendas and debates in international organizations. The advance of transnational capitalism in communications, the privatization of consensus that accompanies the advance of globalization, and various projects for cultural autonomy in communications and emancipation, strained the political and academic spheres.

Since then, the path of EPICC studies in Latin America has been extremely arduous, and the construction of integration spaces is still a task to be strengthened (Becerra and Mastrini 2009; Bolaño, 2000; De Charras and Lozano, 2019)

The Latin American EPICC is part of that history, and of the history of Marxist and critical thought on the continent (Bolaño, 1988). Its research methods are influenced by the dialectical logic of classical Marxism, particularly the critique of political economy, as well as by economics, political science, and the social sciences in general, always in dialogue with the methodologies adopted in other subfields of communication. Their research objects, in turn, include the most diverse topics, from studies on national communication policies (Rivero, Zanotti and Monje 2017), media concentration and structure (Becerra and Mastrini 2009, Becerra 2015), analysis on regulations (Rossi 2018), the organization of work processes (Santos and Bolaño, 2016), the production and distribution of cultural and informational products (Baladrón and Rivero 2019, Fernández and Zanotti, 2018), studies on communication, integration and development (Hidalgo, 2017; Caetano and Sanahuja 2019), to the countless interfaces with communication and education studies (Kaplún, 2015), public media (Zanotti, 2019), popular and alternative communication (Baladrón 2018) etc.

Inscription of the topic in relation to global dynamics

The commodification of communication has experienced exponential growth worldwide in recent decades. This can be seen in the increased participation of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) in the GDP of both developed countries and emerging economies.

According to Zallo (2016), the cultural and creative industries worldwide generate nearly $3.000 billion in revenue, making a significant contribution to GDP and generating a high level of exports. According to the same author, exports amount to $424 billion, 82% of which come from developed countries, reflecting the dominance of these industries in global trade. For its part, UNESCO[4] reported in 2015 that the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) employed 29,5 million people, representing 1% of the workforce.

In Latin America, during the ten-year period between 2004 and 2013, the information and communication sector grew from representing 1% to 2,2% of GDP. Likewise, levels of ownership concentration also increased, both in telecommunications and audiovisual businesses (Becerra and Mastrini, 2009; UNESCO, 2015; SINCA, 2013 and 2017). Various studies—in different countries around the world and in the region in particular—indicate an increasing monthly expenditure on information and cultural goods and connectivity services by households and individuals, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

Furthermore, digitization and convergence have so significantly impacted the growth and concentration of cultural industries that today five of the world's ten largest companies are linked to online communication and culture, displacing oil companies and banks from the top positions. These are Apple, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (Chang, 2013). Billions of people worldwide use the services of these companies. For example, by 2019, Facebook had surpassed 2.300 billion users, and YouTube had reached 1.900 billion. [4]

The exponential growth of this sector of the economy can be illustrated in this way: the social network Facebook went from having 640 million users in 2010 to 2.000 billion in 2017 and 2.320 billion in 2019, Whatsapp went from 1.300 billion users in 2018 to 1.500 billion in 2019, Instagram from 800 million in 2018 to 1.000 billion in 2019[5] and Twitter from 170 million in 2010 to 328 million in 2017 and 330 million in 2019.

By the first half of 2019, there were over 4.300 billion IP addresses distributed across 246 countries, showing an increase compared to previous years. Of that total, the United States ranked first, possessing approximately 1.573 billion.[6]

 Likewise, various studies indicate - in different countries of the world and in the region in particular - an increasing monthly expenditure on informational goods, cultural goods and connectivity services with inelastic trends, by households and individuals, beyond particularities regarding their socioeconomic level.

The contemporary scene thus presents a framework from which central questions about power, inequality, access, pluralism, and democracy in relation to communication can be posed, questions whose conjectural answers require interdisciplinary approaches. And since the impacts of the transformations described here occur on various levels and among actors of different sizes, their analysis requires interpretive frameworks derived from the EPICC (Ethical, Political, and Cultural Industries) in conjunction with normative studies related to the Rights to Communication, the Sociology of Communication, and Political Theory and Philosophy. This will allow us to reflect on and design analytical strategies and comparative studies of the material and symbolic processes in which the Cultural Industries, the Telecommunications sector, and activities on increasingly globalized digital platforms participate. Then, in particular, we propose addressing specific problems related to convergence processes, structuring of info-communication markets, design of public policies and regulations for the telecommunications and audiovisual sector, the new internet economy, or the antagonisms from which the actors who dispute hegemony are constituted, as well as the system of exclusions that are built around the contemporary communication ecosystem.