Beltranianas Vol. V

If the speed of the information society enables the daily creation of “a new world” of information, with increasingly rapid offers of knowledge, it also requires that this entire range of data circulating through communicational “infoways” become part of people’s everyday lives, almost in real time.

This ultimatum enters the worlds of work, leisure, the economy, politics, and culture, as an apparent demand for the individual’s insertion into these contexts. Communicative processes, their media and/or vehicles for transmitting information, have undergone significant changes which, in addition to being singular, have revealed historical particularities, often embedded in political, economic, and social movements, but without losing sight of respect for regional and local cultural singularities.

Although they are frequently charged with biases that assimilate the past, the products circulating through multiple channels of communication seek to reconstruct national identity. To this end, these productive spaces often draw on elements of popular culture and the plurality of its manifestations, staging a duel between the global-national and the regional-local in the recovery of the national ethos.

Our culture is the result of a Brazil of fusions, exchanges, ancient cultures, and the country’s own north-south and east-west immigration across its continental dimensions. This enrichment of signs and meanings, permeated by mass media, translates a specific history and its own rhythm, with peculiarities revealed in historical and subjective times, yet exceeding geographical considerations of region and redefining the concept of the present time.

The complexity of forms, colors, values, flavors, and popular manifestations constitutes the heritage of a society which, filled with particular importance, ensures the preservation of the past and allows for the construction of the future.

The processes of globalization through which the world is passing consolidate the prioritization of the regional in a constant search for mechanisms that transcend national and/or global issues. What we perceive today, however, is a search — not always perceptible to the less attentive — for actions that highlight customs, beliefs, cultures, and other forms of social participation, which are present in diverse social manifestations and resonate intensely among the popular classes.

These are the cultural forms of a specific and singular orb, though not an exclusively individual one. Incorporated into the symbolic universe of peripheral communities, they form a mosaic of singular, though not unique, revelations that break the social isolation to which entire communities are subjected, on the one hand, by so-called globalization and, on the other, by marginalization.

In this plural scenario, local manifestations — which permeate regional differences — erupt with social, economic, political, and cultural implications, bringing forth revelations of regional-local culture as a product derived from historical-geographical differences. On the other hand, the search for answers to questions that encompass differences between localities, as well as the constant challenges of establishing more or less homogeneous spaces, has expanded the possibility of joint and complementary actions, not only in the areas of economics and politics, but also in culture, both local and regional.

The challenge of this transformation has made it possible to go beyond local borders themselves and to envision a global set of activities, with a prevailing sense of cooperation and regional integration.

It is in this sense that we should read this publication, broadening our gaze beyond the local context and the time it recounts. The issues of *Revista Comunicação & Problemas* made available in this volume portray the multiple communicative processes permeated by regional singularities, which are evidenced through regional-local popular manifestations.

The volumes made available here reproduce writings on popular culture, communication processes, research findings, work agendas, and articles dealing with journalism, communication, folklore, and the various actions carried out at Icinform — the Institute of Information Sciences — created by Luiz Beltrão.

The journal circulated for four years, beginning in the second half of the 1960s. It is an important documentary source on the field of Communication at that time, allowing us to understand several issues that, even almost half a century later, still seem highly current.

Published every four months, it ceased circulation after twelve issues, in 1969, recording contributions by José Marques de Melo, Tereza Halliday, Humberto Sodré Pinto, among others. It was the first journal entirely dedicated to Communication studies and research published in Brazil.