Comunicación y cultura

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.

Actualmente vivimos en un mundo en el cual uno de los mayores pilares de la sociedad es la comunicación. El dominio de la lengua y no sólo de una, sino de varias, ha alcanzado mayor importancia, y esta sigue creciendo. En el mercado laboral ya es imprescindible hablar al menos dos o tres diferentes. De ahí, los políglotas se encuentran favorecidos a la hora de optar por un puesto de trabajo; además, el abanico de posibilidades es mucho mayor siendo un políglota que cuando no se dominen varios idiomas. ¿Qué es un políglota? ¿Cuál es el origen de la lengua? O ¿Cómo aprender otro idioma? Esta obra pretende acercar al lector a este mundo tan fascinante de los políglotas, así como responder a estas y otras preguntas. Nació en Praga (República Checa) en 1972. Al año, su familia emigró a Alemania, donde pasó su infancia y, desde 1988, reside en Canarias. Su pasión son los idiomas y la literatura. Durante su niñez escribió varios cuentos y, en la adolescencia, poesía, como pasatiempo; aunque es ahora que comenzó a escribir libros con la finalidad de publicarlos. El primero de todos es “Políglota – el canal de comunicación”, basado en experiencias propias en el mundo de las lenguas y con el que se siente identificada.

Ian Brookes asks: 'What is film noir?' With this sharply focused question active throughout the book, students will benefit from an introductory text designed to provide a sophisticated treatment of the problems inherent in the category. This is the first critical introduction to film noir which takes into account the complexity of the term and the difficulties of straightforward definition and classification. Film noir may seem a familiar genre to many, with its use of a complex narrative structure, flashbacks and voiceover narration, and with such archetypal characterisations as the femme fatale and private eye. But this introduction is not just an account of what film noir is, but also an interrogation of the ways in which the term came to be applied to a particular group of American films of the 1941s and 1950s.

This collection examines the coverage of law and justice on television in different countries around the world. It provides a benchmark for further study of the nature and extent of television coverage of justice in fictional, reality and documentary forms. It does this by drawing on empirical work from a range of scholars in different jurisdictions. Each chapter looks at the raw data of how much "justice" material viewers were able to access in the multi-channel world of 2114 looking at three phases – apprehension (police); adjudication (lawyers), and disposition (prison/punishment). All of the authors indicate how television has developed in their countries. Some have extensive public service channels mixed with private media channels. Financing ranges from advertising to programme sponsorship to licensing arrangements. Some countries have mixtures of these. Each author also examines how "TV justice" has developed in each different jurisdiction. Readers will find interesting variations and some thought-provoking similarities. There are a lot of television shows focussed on legal themes that are imported around the world and the authors analyse these as well. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in law, popular culture, TV, or justice and provides an important addition to the literature due to its grounding in empirical data.

In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors, where film is always an incomplete project, and where audiences are a coming community of ephemeral connections and links. Discussing such filmmakers as Harun Farocki, the Lumiere Brothers, Guy Debord and Wong Kar-wai, Janet Harbord draws connections with Agamben to propose a radically different way of thinking about cinema.

Hitler's Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, on January 31, 1933 marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich, and German film scholarship has generally accepted this date as the break between Weimar and Nazi-era film as well. This collection of essays interrogates the continuities and discontinuities in German cinema before and after January 1933 and their relationship to the various crises of the years 1928-1936 in seven areas: politics, the economy, concepts of race and ethnicity, the making of cinema stars, genre cinema, film technologies and aesthetics, and German-international film relations. Focusing both on canonical and lesser-known works, the essays analyze a representative sample of films and genres from the period. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Weimar and Third Reich cinema and of the sociopolitical, economic, racial, artistic, and technological spheres in both late Weimar and the early Third Reich, as well as to film scholars in general. Contributors: Paul Flaig, Margrit Frolich, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Bastian Heinsohn, Brook Henkel, Kevin B. Johnson, Owen Lyons, Richard McCormick, Kilani Michell, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Valerie Weinstein, Wilfried Wilms. Barbara Hales is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Mihaela Petrescu is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Valerie Weinstein is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Despite the powerful anti-political impulses that have pervaded Italian society in recent years, Italian cinema has sustained and renewed its longstanding engagement with questions of politics, both in the narrow definition of the term, and in a wider understanding that takes in reflections on public life, imaginary, and national identity. This book explores these political dimensions of contemporary Italian cinema by looking at three complementary strands: the thematics of contemporary political film from a variety of perspectives; the most prominent directors currently engaged in this filone; and case studies of the films that best represent this engagement. Conceived and edited by two Italian film scholars working in radically different academic settings, Italian Political Cinema brings together a wide array of critical positions and research from Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The tripartite structure and international perspective create a volume that is an accessible entry-point into a subject that continues to attract critical and cultural attention, both inside and outside of academia.