Sampled culture in contemporary Babel. Notes on colonization and depredation as discoursive practices

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze the relations established by the various discursive practices found in the audiovisual world and the influence some of these strategies exert on each other within what could be known as sampled culture. The network of connections in this complex process becomes increasingly tangled and the texts saturate with meaning, thus forcing the receivers to construct a reading which always goes beyond the text itself in order to confer meaning on the messages. All this can be specifically illustrated by a TV commercial spot produced by the Spanish telephone company Movistar which made use of previous discourses. Although some people considered it plagiarism, the chain of connections was indeed much more intricate than that merely showing an evident similarity between two discourses. How the essence, communicative purposes and pragmatic contexts of these texts are modified is the object of analysis of the following pages.