Comunicación y cultura

É com imensa satisfação que disponibilizamos para acesso público o livro Comunicação na América Latina: da metapesquisa aos estudos mediáticos. Ele representa o registro da memória de duas edições do Colóquio Latino-Americano de Ciências da Comunicação na América Latina, promovidos pela Intercom (Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação), realizados em 2016 e em 2017. Os Colóquios de pesquisa aconteceram como pré-congressos do evento anual da Intercom com o objetivo geral de provocar a sistematização e o debate sobre do estado da pesquisa em Comunicação na América Latina, além de congregar pesquisadores e colocá-los em diálogo entre si e entre as associações científicas e universidades da região. Desse modo, esta coletânea representa também a materialização de um esforço científico – acadêmico importante em prol da integração do campo da Comunicação na América Latina e de sistematização de abordagens que refletem sobre o estado da questão da investigação comunicacional, registram visões históricas e apontam para os desafios e as perspectivas da pesquisa na América Latina. Contudo, sabe-se que o livro tem limites, tanto porque nem todos os expositores enviaram os textos completos de suas exposições verbais, quanto pelas dimensões da América Latina e pela diversidade característica do estado da pesquisa em cada país do continente, impossíveis de serem retratados especificamente nos colóquios e neste livro.

The essays collected in this book adopt different disciplinary approaches to point out the forms of citizens’ participation developed in the fi eld of contemporary public art and urban design. From Sardinia to Queensland, New York to Bologna, Hasselt and Genk to L’Aquila, Rio de Janeiro to Utrecht, these essays analyze a variety of projects that deal with political confl icts of the societal life in the urban spaces, such as environmental risks and immigrant populations; propose diverse forms of citizens’ participation in the representations of marginalized interests, values, problems, and needs; offer to citizens and policy-makers new ways of thinking about territory renewal; and aim to reorient the decisions taken in the fi eld of institutionalized politics, either denouncing territory governance or supporting its improvement.

As more and more aspects of everyday life are turned into machine-readable data, researchers are provided with rich resources for researching society. The novel methods and innovative tools to work with this data not only require new knowledge and skills, but also raise issues concerning the practices of investigation and publication. This book critically reflects on the role of data in academia and society and challenges overly optimistic expectations considering data practices as means for understanding social reality. It introduces its readers to the practices and methods for data analysis and visualization and raises questions not only about the politics of data tools, but also about the ethics in collecting, sifting through data, and presenting data research. AUP S17 Catalogue text As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualization, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.

En los últimos años, la mayoría de los gobiernos latinoamericanos han realizado esfuerzos destinados a mejorar la inclusión digital en sus países, desarrollando diversas políticas en el ámbito educativo. Estas iniciativas han sido y continúan siendo profusamente evaluadas, con distintos enfoques y perspectivas teórico-metodológicas. En este contexto, resulta pertinente y necesaria una reflexión crítica acerca de las formas en que se estudian estas políticas, puesto que las evaluaciones no son neutrales y tienen, lógicamente, consecuencias en la continuidad, reformulación o abandono de los programas. Ello a su vez se refleja de manera directa en las recomendaciones hacia los gobiernos e instancias decisorias de la política pública y no siempre permite comprender la experiencia de los sujetos concretos involucrados. En el caso de los modelos Uno a Uno, este problema se vuelve particularmente significativo debido a las altas expectativas que depositaron los gobiernos respecto del alcance de la inclusión social y educativa, en contraste con ciertas evaluaciones críticas.

Who watches over the party-state? In this engaging analysis, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has defined this volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era.

La gran mayoría de los que somos aficionados al mundo del manga y al anime, sentimos curiosidad por conocer más allá de lo que vemos dibujado en las páginas de un tomo o plasmado en una pantalla. En este sentido es bastante difícil encontrar material original en castellano que muestre detalladamente cómo se crea una animación en Japón, cuáles son las etapas del proceso de elaboración de un anime o qué herramientas se utilizan para dar vida a los personajes que nos han fascinado desde hace tantos años.

En este libro se da respuesta a cada una de esas preguntas, presentando el particular lenguaje del anime a través de sus orígenes, su estética, sus técnicas tantos tradicionales como digitales y, en especial, las bases de su proceso de su producción. Una valiosa información que nos mostrará el fantástico mundo del anime desde una perspectiva diferente, indagando en sus secuencias fotograma a fotograma y redescubriendo la animación japonesa desde los primeros dibujos en papel hasta su aparición en pantalla.

«La idea de original está estrechamente entrelazada con la de verdad, y la verdad es una técnica cultural que atenta contra el cambio por medio de la exclusión y la trascendencia. Los chinos aplican otra técnica cultural, que opera con la inclusión y la inmanencia. Solo en el terreno de esta última es posible relacionarse con las copias y las reproducciones de manera libre y productiva.»

“Shanzhai” es un neologismo chino que refiere a la apropiación de una forma o una idea, desestimando su estatus de originalidad. Un shanzhai es un fake, una copia pirata, una parodia. Aplicado en un principio a las falsificaciones de productos electrónicos y marcas de ropa, este concepto hoy abarca todos los terrenos de la vida en China: hay arquitectura shanzhai, comida shanzhai, diputados shanzhai y hasta estrellas del espectáculo shanzhai. En tanto su atractivo radica precisamente en la variación funcional e ingeniosa, son mucho más que meras falsificaciones baratas. No pretenden engañar a nadie. Su capacidad de innovación, que es innegable, no se define por el genio o la creación ex nihilo, sino por ser parte de un proceso anónimo y continuado de combinación y mutación.

A partir de la elaboración de este y de otros conceptos presentes en la larga tradición del arte chino así como en el budismo o el taoísmo, el teórico cultural Byung-Chul Han nos revela en este lúcido ensayo algunas claves para comprender los diferentes posicionamientos de Oriente y Occidente frente a problemáticas contemporáneas tales como las leyes de propiedad intelectual, la conservación patrimonial o la clonación. A la creencia occidental en la inmutabilidad y la permanencia de la sustancia, se corresponde una noción de autoría y originalidad: el ser es igual a sí mismo y por ello toda reproducción tiene algo de demoníaco, que destruye la identidad y la pureza primarias. El pensamiento chino, en cambio, es deconstructivo desde sus comienzos, prescinde de toda idea de ser y esencia. Frente a la identidad, reivindica la diferencia transformadora; frente al ser, el camino.

Transborder Media Spaces offers a new perspective on how media forms like photography, video, radio, television, and the Internet have been appropriated by Mexican indigenous people in the light of transnational migration and ethnopolitical movements. In producing and consuming self-determined media genres, actors in Tamazulapam Mixe and its diaspora community in Los Angeles open up media spaces and seek to forge more equal relations both within Mexico and beyond its borders. It is within these spaces that Ayuujk people carve out their own, at times conflicting, visions of development, modernity, gender, and what it means to be indigenous in the twenty-first century.

The Praxis of Social Inequality in Media: A Global Perspective provides a global analysis of the intersection of social inequalities, media, and communication. This volume contains chapters by an international array of scholars and provides case studies from various countries with critical empirical analysis of social inequalities and how they shape media narratives and experiences. The topics examined here include poverty in the media in Britain and Turkey, technology and inequality in Italy and Bangladesh, gender, inequality, and empowerment in India, Mexico, and Australia, and cross national analysis of rape culture, among others.

Becoming Digital examines the transition from the online world we have known to the Next Internet, which is emerging from the convergence of Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things. The Cloud stores and processes information in data centers; Big Data Analytics provide the tools to analyse and use it; and the Internet of Things connects sensor-equipped devices everywhere to communication networks that span the globe. These technologies make possible a post-Internet society filled with homes that think, machines that make decisions, drones that deliver packages or bombs, and robots that work for us, play with us, and take our jobs. The Next Internet promises a world where computers are everywhere, even inside our bodies, “coming alive” to make possible the unification of people and machines in what some call the Singularity.

This timely book explores this potential as both a reality on the horizon and a myth that inspires a new religion of technology. It takes up the coming threats to a democratic, decentralized, and universal Internet and the potential to deepen the problems of commercial saturation, concentrated economic power, cyber-warfare, the erosion of privacy, and environmental degradation. On the other hand, it also shows how the Next Internet can help expand democracy, empowering people worldwide, providing for more of life’s necessities, and advancing social equality. But none of this will happen without concerted political and policy action. Becoming Digital points the way forward.