A la luz de las diferentes expectativas que ofrecen las nuevas tecnologías de la información y comunicación (ciberoptimismo y ciberpesimismo), se analizará el impacto real que han demostrado en sus aplicaciones a diferentes contextos socio-políticos en España, medido en términos de logro de una vida ciudadana más activa y participativa.
In the XXI century the relations between Journalism and Democracy spread and complete with the relations between Cyberjournalism and Cyberdemocracy. This new link begins to redefine the classic notion of public space. In the first part of the article (1-3), the origin and the crisis of the illustrated modernity project that is formulated at the end of the XVIII century are analyzed briefly, and in relation with the Greek world. This project, borned in the confidence of a critical and public use of the human rational, will link, in an essential way, the concepts of democracy, journalism, public opinion and citizenship, as foundations of the political order. Nevertheless, for some authors this project has entered in crisis. On the one hand, because the instrumental drift of the modern rationality would have eliminated the ethical foundations of such a project. On the other hand, because the socio-economic and cultural scenes of the late modernity seem to be rather slightly propitious to an order in which the mass media -and the public opinion that they construct- facilitate both, the comprehension of the political reality and the civil participation in the deliberative processes of the democratic life. In the second part of the article (4-6) it is analyzed if the New Media -also arisen under the protection of this new disordered environment- allow to shelter the hope of a cyberdemocratic redefinition of the Public Space, with a denomination that remains still hanging. In the light of the different expectations that New Information and Communication Technologies offer (cyberoptimism versus cyberpessimism), the real impact that certains applications have demonstrated in different socio-political contexts in Spain will be analyzed, measured in terms of achievement of much more civil activation and participation in the public life.