Comunicación y cultura

En 1993 decía en un artículo de la revista Chasqui: Tener la palabra significa tener el poder. Aparentemente incluso bajo regímenes autoritarios todos hablan. Pero ¿de qué habla el pueblo?, ¿a través de qué vías se expresa? Y recurriendo a Daniel Prieto Castillo agregaba: Existe una división social del poder decir, que consagra un orden social regido por las desigualdades.
Describía así una realidad que luego de veinte años no ha cambiado mucho. Durante estos últimas dos décadas he sido un observador de los procesos comunicacionales que se han dado en América Latina, particularmente en Ecuador y Uruguay. He sido investigador y docente en comunicación. Y además he trabajado en diferentes medios.
Este libro reúne artículos y ensayos que escribí en los últimos veinte años y, de cierta forma, nos ubican en temas y momentos importantes sobre la comunicación en nuestra región.
De aquellos años en que analizaba la cultura del silencio, la comunicación desde la vida cotidiana, los intereses de los grandes medios y su necesaria democratización; al 2110 que señalo la necesidad estratégica de Ecuador y los países de América Latina de transparentar los cables de Wikileaks, analizar y profundizar en su contenido y mi disposición de invitar a Julián Assange, a quien consideraba un perseguido político, mucho se ha debatido sobre la democratización de la comunicación en medio de transformaciones tecnológicas fundamentales. Sin embargo, a pesar de los avances, la democratización de la comunicación sigue siendo una tarea pendiente, y la comunicación sigue siendo una especie de “Arca de la Realidad” a la que no todos pueden ingresar.
En un momento que irrumpen con mucha fuerza la redes sociales y la comunicación personal se traslada a las computadoras, que surge con fuerza el debate sobre la libertad de expresión, que la comunicación política pasa a ser el centro de las gestiones gubernamentales y las campañas electorales, que se retoma el viejo debate ético sobre el acceso a la información, a partir de la divulgación de los cables diplomáticos por parte de Wikileaks y la persecución de Assange, este libro intenta ser un aporte para seguir democratizando la comunicación y continuar construyendo una comunicación para todos y todas, desde todos y todas, una comunicación propia desde América Latina.

Media Framing of the Muslim World is a fascinating account of how news about Islam and the Muslim world is produced and consumed, and how it impacts on relations between Islam and the West. The topics addressed in this book include how news values and media frames contribute to Western audiences' perceptions and understandings of Islam and Muslims; the extent to which historic conceptions of orientalism remain salient and are manifested in Islamophobia; how reporting on terrorism and asylum seekers impacts on public opinion and policy making; how the relationship between mass and social media contribute to the changing socio-political landscape of the Middle East and our understanding of the Muslim world; and how journalism and audiences have evolved in the decade since 9/11. Together, these topics make essential reading for scholars, students and anyone interested in the Western media's coverage of the Muslim world and its impact on Islam-West relations.

Digital Textuality explores the ways in which the English language is used in new media technologies. This undergraduate textbook covers a range of digital text genres, including news sites, social media, collaborative fiction, hypertext fiction and poetry. Using Hallidayan linguistics, along with other approaches, such as Discourse Analysis, Multimodal Semiotics and Text World Theory, this book reflects the latest language-based research in digital texts. Topics included in these chapters are digital literacy, identity, online communities, hybridity and superdiversity.

This book is about new media, young people, the crisis of democracy and political renewal. It addresses a mixture of traditional and new questions: What is the political and political legitimacy? How do we understand politics in a 'network age'? Can we talk sensibly about the concept of a generation and generational change? Does democracy have a future? This book offers an optimistic assessment of how digital media supports new and distinctive forms of politics. Four case studies are offered: one considers performance art and protest in Russia, another investigates new media campaigns to defend the rights to freedom of speech and copyright in America, another inquires into indigenous art and interactive cartoons as politics in outback Australia and the last explores new forms of student action in schools and in the modern university.

This collection investigates the relationship between contemporary screen narratives and their varied contexts of production, circulation and reception, exploring storytelling practices across a range of different media and national and institutional sites. While convergence and globalisation blur the boundaries between media and nations, it is still vital to account for the persistent national, medium, institutional and technological specificities that give rise to different narrative forms. The chapters study the ways in which these factors shape events, characters and settings; inform modes of narrative presentation; influence, via paratextual surround, potential interpretations; and accord certain stories more value than others. The authors use case studies drawn from a range of media, from Hollywood franchises to digital comics, and a range of countries, from United States to Japan. In connecting contemporary screen media narratives to their contexts, this book offers a new perspective on recent transformations in screen media culture.

Cyber Ireland explores, for the first time, the presence and significance of cyberculture in Irish literature. Computers are intimately tied up with the socio-economic phenomenon known as the Celtic Tiger, as some critics have argued, funding the boom and then creating the bust. Through novels by contemporary Irish writers including Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Paul Murray and Élís Ní Dhuibhne, Claire Lynch introduces a new strand of Irish studies for the twenty-first century. Cyber Ireland draws on Joycean hypertexts, the avatars and identity experiments of Second Life, the parallels between Irish chick lit and blogging, the digital divide created by new wealth and social class, and even the reinvention of Cúchulainn in computer games.

How can a society communicate a collective trauma? This book offers a cross-media exploration of Israeli media on Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of Israel's most sacred national rituals, over the past six decades. It investigates the way in which variables such as medium, structure of ownership, genre and targeted audiences shape the collective recollection of traumatic memories. Following their previous conceptual work on media memory, the authors argue that a combination of the aforementioned factors, anchored in the political arena as well as in the realm of media practices and conventions, lead Israeli media to operate on Holocaust Remembrance Day in a manner that 'acts out' the collective trauma. Thus, the underlying narrative that is performed by the media on Holocaust Remembrance Day frames the Holocaust as a current, ongoing Israeli event, rather than an event that took place in Europe and ended decades ago.

Neoliberalism, Media and the Political presents a novel critical analysis of the condition of media and journalism in neoliberal cultures. Emphasizing neoliberalism's status as a political ideology that is simultaneously hostile to politics, the argument is grounded in empirical illustrations from different social contexts, including post-Rogernomics New Zealand, Celtic Tiger Ireland,
the Leveson Inquiry into the UK press, and the climate-sceptic blogosphere. Phelan draws on a variety of theoretical sources, especially Laclau and Bourdieu, to affirm the importance of neoliberalism as an analytical concept. Yet, he also interrogates how critiques of neoliberalism – in media research and elsewhere – can reduce social practices to the category of neoliberal. Against the image of a monolithic free-market ideology that imposes itself on other domains, the book identifies the potential sites of a cultural politics within neoliberalized media regimes.

Media and Nostalgia takes a closer look at the recent nostalgia boom and the relationship between media and nostalgia more generally; for example, digital photography that adopts a vintage style, the success of films such as The Artist and television series such as Mad Men, revivals of past music, fashion, and video games. However, this boom is not simply a fascination with the past; rather, it hints at something more profound. Expressions of nostalgia indicate a double helix type phenomenon with slower reactions to ever-faster technologies, and the possibility of an escape from the current crisis into a middle status of wanderlust (Fernweh) and a specific form of nostalgia such as homesickness. This collection explores, with a critical lens, the ways in which various media produce narratives of nostalgia, how they trigger nostalgic emotions and how they can in fact be a creative projection space in themselves.

Contemporary culture offer contradictory views of the internet and new media technologies, painting them in extremes of optimistic enthusiasm and pessimistic foreboding. While some view them as a repository of hopes for democracy, freedom and self-realisation, others consider these developments as sources of alienation, dehumanisation and danger. This book explores such representations, and situates them within the traditions of utopian and dystopian thought that have shaped the Western cultural imaginary. Ranging from ancient poetry to post-humanism, and classical sociology to science fiction, it uncovers the roots of our cultural responses to the internet, which are centred upon a profoundly ambivalent reaction to technological modernity. Majid Yar argues that it is only by better understanding our society's reactions to technological innovation that we can develop a balanced and considered response to the changes and challenges that the internet brings in its wake.