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The Spanish general elections of 2008 held attributes familiar to Western democracies: permanent campaigning, negativism, and personalization. The mainstream media played along the strategy of bipartisan polarization encouraged by the Socialists and the conservatives, which resulted in a loss of power for the smaller nationalist parties and the postcommunist left. Candidate debates returned to Spanish television after fifteen years, but the moderating role of journalists was banned by the two big parties, who defined and agreed on the debate topics beforehand.The use of new communication technologies by political parties did not result in an open-source campaign. Spontaneous citizen participation was more feared than desired, and formerly revolutionary Web 2.0 was co-opted and tamed by the parties, integrating it into their political marketing tool kit

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Local media perform a linking function for displaced audiences in a global landscape. Consumption of home-based press when one is in a foreign context is mainly a ritualistic cultural practice in securing personal identity, familiar formulations of cultural spaces, and communities of origin. Ethnographic research revealed that national newspapers allowed readers to (re)produce situated identity marks menaced by globlization. Audiences may use local media to ground themselves in symbolic environments in which external and internal boundaries are reassured through time and space. In this local cultural setting, individual and collective identities acquire stability and self-confidence.There is a frequent scene in many libraries of the developed world. Foreign residents gather and read their home-based media in the international newspaper section. These dispersed or wandering audiences (Grossberg, 1988;Radway, 1988) are represented in this article by the foreign students at a university in the U.S. Their discourse, displayed after or while reading their national press, revealed the sense of displacement in consuming outdated media referring to a distant environment. A communal function of communication (Philipsen, 1992) was observed, showing interlocutors expressing cultural senses of shared identities and group memberships (pp. 139-140). Readers attempted a symbolic linking and identification with their cultural spaces of origin.The ethnolinguistic perspective (Carbaugh, 1994;Fitch, 1994) was used to describe the ways that local mass communication links disconnected people and moves them to construct a narrative made up of communal dimensions of identity and positions of subjectivity. However, cultural positioning also implied sources of conflict and differences that distinguished members of the same cultural community or separated them from the host culture.Victor Sampedro (PhD, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1995) is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Salamanca, Spain. His research interests include public opinion, media effects, and media reception. The author thanks James Ettema, Richard Maxwell, Jan Valsiner, Alan Rubin, and three anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Communication for their suggestions. He also thanks Neil, a member of a truly diasporic posse.

RESUMENEl éxito comunicativo de Podemos es un ejemplo de cómo aplicar las teorías de la hegemonía ideológica que analizaron sus líderes académicos. Su estrategia mediática consiste en una combinación secuencial y simbiótica de producción audiovisual propia, viralización en redes digitales, y presencia en medios y formatos convencionales mayoritarios, como la tertulia televisiva. Sus limitaciones muestran la importancia de la economía política de los medios convencionales, aún mayoritarios entre la audiencia y decisivos para disputar la hegemonía. En un breve periodo de tiempo la joven formación política ha pasado de la invisibilidad a la sobre-exposición negativa. PALABRAS CLAVEHegemonía, post-estructuralismo, Laclau, Mouffe, nueva comunicación política, ciberpolítica, economía política, tertulias, redes sociales, televisión. ABSTRACTThe communicative success of Podemos is an example of how to apply the ideological hegemony theories that its academic leaders have researched. The media strategy of Podemos consists of a sequential and symbiotic combination of self-controlled audiovisual production, viralization through digital networks, and visibility in conventional media and formats, such as TV talk-shows. Its limitations show just how important the political economy of conventional media actually is: They still keep an overwhelming audience majority and are decisive in any hegemonic dispute. In a short period of time, this new political party has gone from insivibility to a negative over-exposure.