Medios digitales y funcionalismo: reflexiones del estreno de Joker

Abstract

Joker is a film that gained relevance for two aspects: the praise of the critics after its presentation at the Venice Film Festival (August 28 to September 7, 2019) when it received the highest award of the event, Golden Lion, and due to the controversy generated prior to its premiere to the public. In this sense, the purpose of this work is to identify the qualitative relationships between the premiere of the Joker film and the collective hysteria expressed in socio-digital networks, based on the postulates of social-functionalism in communication. This phenomenon acquires meaning from the news presented by the media prior to the premiere of the film and the response of the public, which was polarized. The analysis of a non-probabilistic sample is used as evidence to address the insufficiency of functionalist analogies in their attempt to portray phenomena that are directly linked to the logic of the new digital media.