Las políticas culturales y la comunicación para el desarrollo de los mercados digitales: un debate necesario

Abstract

The article sumarizes the results of an extensive research, recently published, on the cultural industries in Spain that has been carried out under the direction of Enrique Bustamante. Cultural industries in the digital era are developing new cultural and comunicative expressions as well as new ways of organizing and managing production and markets. Along with these changes there are also clear and dangerous signs of a deeper domination of communication by even few and bigger companies; it is possible as well to perceive deeping inequalities in the acces to communication. It is not more deregulation what is required in these times of qualitative expansion of markets, but a new system of regulation and new policy tools that will properly take into account issues as important as the territorial dimension of communication, the structural weaknesses and divides of the culture and communication sector and the specific characteristics of the digital worlds. We first make a sum-up balance of the cultural policies that are currently being implemented and their poor results; then we point out some new problems that can be observed facing the digital era; finally we risk to make detailed proposals for the future that can be apt for both the analogic and digital culture.