Critical Organization of Knowledge in Mass Media Information Systems

This paper studies knowledge organization (KO) in media archives, focusing on the presence of subjectivity in the core tasks of mass media knowledge organizers (MKOS) dealing with press, radio and TV records, such as classification, representation, and any other process related to content analysis and organization in news information systems. Far from rejecting subjectivity and ideological bias in these operations - since they co-participate in the media construction of reality-the authors consider MKOS to be genuine ideological and cultural mediators with the right and social responsibility to explicitly state the results of their "objectifiable" work (obtained through KO protocols and procedures determined by the media/company, classifications, thesauri, ontologies, etc.) and differentiate them from those of their political, ideological, cultural and, in sum, subjective stances. In order to achieve this, we propose the application of critical operators that should be followed by technical, collaborative and even technological actions geared to investing information systems with the capacity to consider those stances and allowing users to distinguish them. In short, it is the theoretical recognition of the subjective and biased presence of media knowledge organization operators in a job that is usually considered neutral, banal and even objective, and the initial development of tools for critical, self-critical, technical, and technological training keyed to its practical solution. This paper outlines the lines of work of a broader research study on the critical function of KO in the field of global media memory.