Comunicación y cultura

Social Media Abyss plunges into the paradoxical condition of the new digital normal versus a lived state of emergency. There is a heightened, post-Snowden awareness D we know we are under surveillance but we click, share, rank and remix with a perverse indifference to technologies of capture and cultures of fear. Despite the incursion into privacy by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, social media use continues to be a daily habit with shrinking gadgets now an integral part of our busy lives. We are thrown between addiction anxiety and subliminal, obsessive use. Where does art, culture and criticism venture when the digital vanishes into the background? Geert Lovink strides into the frenzied social media debate with Social Media Abyss the fifth volume of his ongoing investigation into critical internet culture. He examines the symbiotic yet problematic relation between networks and social movements, and further develops the notion of organized networks. Lovink doesn't just submit to the empty soul of 24/7 communication but rather provides the reader with radical alternatives. Selfie culture is one of many Lovink's topics, along with the internet obsession of American writer Jonathan Franzen, the internet in Uganda, the aesthetics of Anonymous and an anatomy of the Bitcoin religion. Will monetization through cybercurrencies and crowdfunding contribute to a redistribution of wealth or further widen the gap between rich and poor? In this age of the free, how a revenue model of the 99% be collectively designed? Welcome back to the Social Question.

Split into four sections, Seeing Fans analyzes the representations of fans in the mass media through a diverse range of perspectives. This collection opens with a preface by noted actor and fan Orlando Jones (Sleepy Hollow), whose recent work on fandom (appearing with Henry Jenkins at Comic Con and speaking at the Fan Studies Network symposium) bridges the worlds of academia and the media industry. Section one focuses on the representations of fans in documentaries and news reports and includes an interview with Roger Nygard, director of Trekkies and Trekkies 2. The second section then examines fictional representations of fans through analyses of television and film, featuring interviews with Emily Perkins of Supernatural, Robert Burnett, director of the film Free Enterprise, and Luminosity, a fan who has been interviewed in the New York Magazine for her exemplary work in fandom. Section three explores cultural perspectives on fan representations, and includes an interview with Laurent Malaquais, director of Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. Lastly, the final section looks at global perspectives on the ways fans have been represented and finishes with an interview with Jeanie Finlay, director of the music documentary Sound it Out. The collection then closes with an afterword by fan studies scholar Professor Matt Hills.

From Tolkien to Star Trek, from Game of Thrones to Battlestar Galactica, and from The Walking Dead to Janelle Monae's Afrofuturist concept albums, transmedia world-building offers us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. This book examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negri's theory of global capitalism, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics shows how transmedia world-building has the potential of offering more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media convergence and participatory culture. The book features eight fantastic storyworlds that offer vivid illustrations of global capitalism's contradictory logic. Approaching transmedia world-building both as a cultural form and as a political economy, it demonstrates the limitations inherent in fandom and fan culture, which is increasingly absorbed as a form of immaterial labor. But at the same time, the book also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics, popular culture, and anticapitalism.

Winner of the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Organization There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By 'writing the net', Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of 'electronic literature'; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers' body to the work of the net. The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net's "becoming-literary," by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer's body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of "as-if." Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary.

It has become something of a cliché within the field of narratology to assert the commercial, aesthetic, and sociocultural relevance of narrative representations, but the fact remains that narratives are everywhere. Whenever we read a novel or a comic, watch a film or an episode of our favorite television series, or play the latest video game, we are likely to engage with narrative media. Similarly, the intermedial adaptations and transmedial entertainment franchises that have become increasingly visible during the past few decades are, at their core, narrative forms. Since a significant part of contemporary mediaculture is defined by the narratives we tell each other via various media, media studies need a genuinely transmedial narratology.
Focusing on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture provides not only a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and videogames but also a theoretical frame within which medium-specific approachesfrom literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of media and culturalstudies may be employed to further our understanding of narratives across media.

This new Handbook links the growing body of media and conflict research with the field of security studies.

The academic sub-field of media and conflict has developed and expanded greatly over the past two decades. Operating across an unusually diverse range of academic fields, including political science, communications, journalism and media studies, cultural studies, international relations, sociology and psychology, scholars have engaged with a wide variety of issues concerning media and violent conflict. In no particular order of importance, academics have studied the ways in which news media has both enabled and constrained governments pursuing war, the role of the media as a catalyst for attempts to respond to humanitarian crises, the ways in which actors involved in violent political struggle and terrorists have exploited communication tools to further their aims, the role of media as a facilitator of, and a threat to, both peace building and conflict prevention. Underpinning this diverse and eclectic body of research is the recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of security and conflict. While the intellectual diversity of this field is an undoubted strength, there is also a pressing need to begin a process of facilitating both the consolidation of existing knowledge and the sketching out of the parameters of sub-field that can provide a location for the array of academics working on media and conflict. This handbook takes the process forward by linking the body of conflict and media research with field of security studies

The handbook is arranged into five sections. The first section ‘Theory and Principles’ explores a range of key theoretical and conceptual issues including various interpretations of the relationship between security and media, normative issues arising as well as locating ‘media and security’ within a broad conceptualisation of media that includes new forms of communication technology and popular culture. The section, overall, will provide a detailed account of state of the art foundational issues relating to how scholars think about media and security and what is considered important to study, and why. The following sections, ‘Media and "Traditional War"’, ‘Media and Human Security’, ‘Media and Policymaking in the Security State’ and 'Media and New Issues in Security' are designed to reflect, in broad terms, the existing research foci of the security studies field.

For scholars of security studies, this handbook will provide a key point of reference for state of the art scholarship concerning the media-security nexus; for scholars of communication and media studies, the handbook will provide a comprehensive mapping of the media-conflict field.

We are living in a time of inflationary media. While technological change has periodically altered and advanced the ways humans process and transmit knowledge, for the last 110 years the media with which we produce, transmit, and record ideas have multiplied in kind, speed, and power. Saturation in media is provoking a crisis in how we perceive and understand reality. Media become inflationary when the scope of their representation of the world outgrows the confines of their culture's prior grasp of reality. We call the resulting concept of reality that emerges the culture's medialogy. Medialogies offers a highly innovative approach to the contemporary construction of reality in cultural, political, and economic domains. Egginton and Castillo, both luminary scholars, combine a very accessible style with profound theoretical analysis, relying not only on works of philosophy and political theory but also on novels, Hollywood films, and mass media phenomena. The book invites us to reconsider the way reality is constructed, and how truth, sovereignty, agency, and authority are understood from the everyday, philosophical, and political points of view. A powerful analysis of actuality, with its roots in early modernity, this work is crucial to understanding reality in the information age.

Internet es el gran mito de nuestros días. Sus posibilidades, desarrollo, estatuto jurídico e implicaciones sociales juegan un papel fundamental para comprender la dinámica social y sus conflictos. Sin embargo, existe un vacío en lo que respecta al análisis de la Red en sí, de sus tendencias, procesos y la manera en que las relaciones de poder y dominio actúan sobre ella.

Centrado en un aspecto poco considerado, aunque trascendental, de la preservación digital, el libro trata de responder a una pregunta básica… y esto ¿cuánto cuesta? Es indiscutible que el mundo se hace digital, como también la información y los medios que la soportan. Nuevos medios, nuevos retos y entre ellos el de su conservación. Mientras que el papel, físico, corpóreo, nos tenía acostumbrados a las certezas, el digital, virtual, alojado en la nube, nos inclina a la confianza. Tendemos a dar por hecho que lo que no se ve, ni pesa, ni se aprehende y es ubicuo, cuesta poco o nada, y siempre está en alguna parte. En medio de esta complacencia tecnológica, el libro surgió de la inquietud que produce comprobar que, además de ser un lugar común, carecemos de una metodología adecuada para calcular cuánto cuesta preservar lo digital y si es comparable con lo de la información analógica. Es curioso que pudiéndose precisar el coste de cualquier actividad e, incluso, planificarlo, el de nuestra elección carece de una certeza equivalente. Un entorno como el de la tecnologías basado en normas, reglas, cálculos exactos… está en un nivel destacable de incertidumbre sobre los costes de su preservación. Y este trabajo pretende centrar el tema, analizar y sistematizar los factores de costes que intervienen, así como los principales modelos desarrollados. Se trata del primer ensayo en nuestra lengua que aborda la materia desde una perspectiva globalizadora y, aún quedando mucho camino por recorrer, se ofrecen al interesado un conjunto de reflexiones, información precisa y fuentes de conocimiento suficientes para desenvolverse en esta tierra ignota.

Las series de televisión se han convertido en uno de los productos culturales más relevantes de la contemporaneidad, hasta el punto de que hoy prácticamente todos tenemos una o varias series de cabecera. Títulos como Los Soprano, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Homeland o Juego de tronos son objeto de análisis filosóficos, artículos de opinión en periódicos, temas de tesis doctorales y hasta referencias en los discursos políticos. Pero ¿cómo y por qué se ha producido esta emergencia de las series de televisión dentro del espacio cultural? Este ensayo pretende dar respuesta a esta cuestión realizando un recorrido por los diferentes aspectos de la cultura de las series, explicando cómo los cambios experimentados por la televisión contemporánea han modificado la manera de producirlas y consumirlas. En lo que se denomina la nueva edad de oro de la televisión, los creadores de series son nombres populares y sus creaciones, comparadas en términos favorables con el cine y hasta con la literatura, protagonistas de festivales. Y, aunque sobre todo se habla y escribe sobre series norteamericanas, poco a poco esta reivindicación va llegando a Europa y particularmente a España. El propósito del libro, en suma, es prestar atención al esfuerzo de las series por la conquista de su legitimidad, con la premisa de que esta indagación nos revelará aspectos sobre la manera en la que construyen jerarquías culturales en el actual periodo de transformación social.