Teorías de la comunicación y metodología

En un momento en el que las "falsas noticias", la renovada hostilidad hacia grupos históricamente marginados y la polarización política amenazan la calidad de la democracia alrededor del mundo, Leonarda García-Jiménez ha escrito una apasionada defensa de la comunicación y su teoría. Su perspicaz libro, bellamente escrito, promueve la idea de que no necesitamos más sino mejor comunicación si queremos crear culturas plurales e inclusivas que den un mayor peso a los compromisos éticos que sostienen a la democracia como una forma de vida en comunidad. Para desarrollar esta cuestión, la autora nos muestra el valor de la teoría de la comunicación como una manera de comprensión y acción que atraviesa a la investigación académica y a la vida cotidiana (…)

García-Jiménez argumenta que los estudios de la comunicación deben estar comprometidos ética y democráticamente y deben promover activamente el pluralismo como hecho social y valor cultural (…)

Como la autora apunta, la comunicación no es de ninguna manera una poción mágica que pueda resolver todos nuestros problemas y su libro no está escrito con ese espíritu. Por el contrario, está escrito para aquellos que creen ? o al menos perciben- que una mejor comunicación es esencial para encontrar nuestro camino a través de los retos éticos y democráticos de nuestra era. Su consistente atención a las interrelaciones entre la teoría de la comunicación y la vida cotidiana significa que este libro está dirigido por igual a investigadores, estudiantes y ciudadanos ordinarios (…)
Leonarda García-Jiménez escribe este libro con una voz intelectual auténtica y moralmente comprometida, una obra que concluye con un ambicioso y valioso set de metas normativas y objetos de investigación para los estudios de la comunicación en el siglo XXI. El resultado global es una sólida y elocuente defensa de la comunicación y su investigación.

Peter Simonson
Catedrático de la University of Colorado Boulder (Estados Unidos)

El objetivo de este libro es realizar una aportación al estudio de las ideologías sobre la lengua en los medios de comunicación escritos en el ámbito hispánico. Está formado por dieciocho trabajos agrupados en tres bloques temáticos dedicados, respectivamente, al análisis de las ideologías desde una perspectiva histórica, a temas relacionados con el componente ideológico de la diversidad lingüística, y al análisis de los recursos discursivos empleados para la expresión verbal de las ideologías sobre la lengua. En ellos, desde distintas metodologías, -más histórica, más discursiva, más orientada a la norma-, se ha intentado dar respuesta a cuestiones como quién gestiona la autoridad lingüística, cómo los hablantes percibimos la lengua, y cómo se distribuye todo ello a través de la prensa

Érase una vez un mundo en el que la comunicación funcionaba solo en una dirección. Cada día, marcas e instituciones se limitaban a repetir su mensaje muchas veces. Pero entonces, llegó un tsunami digital, arrasó aquel mundo, y el público empezó a decidir cómo y cuándo deseaba recibir la información. Por ese motivo, las marcas tuvieron que reinventar completamente sus estrategias de comunicación. Hasta que un día, apareció el storytelling como una metodología perfectamente adaptada al nuevo contexto. Desde entonces, la comunicación de marcas e instituciones ya no volvería a ser nunca más la simple emisión unilateral de un mensaje. Se convirtió en una forma de tejer un vínculo más complejo y más rico con los usuarios.

Las historias nos emocionan, nos inquietan, permanecen en nuestra memoria y reaparecen para influirnos cuando tenemos que actuar. Este libro desgrana el arte del storytelling como técnica de comunicación y lo aborda en todas sus dimensiones —vivencial, cultural, racional— para que comprendamos bien sus mecanismos de funcionamiento y logremos transmitir eficazmente mensajes en forma de narración.

Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marxist film theory.

Fight Club is an exceptionally useful text with which to explore these three concepts because it so vividly and pedagogically engages with economic relations, ideological distortion, and opportunities for transformation. At the same time, it is a very typical film in terms of the conditions of its production, its marketing, and its popularity. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film is a contemporary classic that has lent itself to significant re-interpretation with every shift in the political economic landscape since its debut.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club models a detailed cinematic interpretation that students can practice with other films, and furnishes a set of ideas about cinema and society that can be carried into other kinds of study, giving students tools for analyzing culture broadly defined.

Lighting and shadows are used within a range of art forms to create aesthetic effects. Piotr Sadowski's study of light and shadow in Weimar cinema and contemporaneous visual arts is underpinned by the evolutionary semiotic theories of indexicality and iconicity. These theories explain the unique communicative and emotive power of light and shadow when used in contemporary indexical media including the shadow theatre, silhouette portraits, camera obscura, photography and film.

In particular, Sadowski highlights the aesthetic and emotional significance of shadows. The 'cast shadow', as an indexical sign, maintains a physical connection with its near-present referent, such as a hidden person, stimulating a viewer's imagination and provoking responses including anxiety or curiosity. The 'cinematic shadow' plays a stylistic role, by enhancing image texture, depth of field, and tonal contrast of cinematic moments. Such enhancements are especially important in monochromatic films, and Sadowski interweaves the book with accounts of seminal Weimar cinema moments.

Sadowski's book is distinctive for combining historical materials and theoretical approaches to develop a deeper understanding of Weimar cinema and other contemporary art forms. The Semiotics of Light and Shadows is an ideal resource for both scholars and students working in linguistics, semiotics, film, media, and visual arts.

Covering all of the major genres, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing is a complete introductory manual for students of creative writing. Now in its second edition, the book features an updated and expanded chapter on writing for digital media, and new exercises for reading across the genres and writing hybrid forms. Through a structured series of practical writing exercises – perfect for the classroom, the writer's workshop or as a starting point for a portfolio of work – the book builds the student writer from the first explorations of voice and the relationship between writing and knowledge, through to mastery of a wide range of genres and forms.

The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing covers such genres as:
· Autobiographical writing
· Short fiction
· Poetry
· Screenwriting and writing for performance
· Writing for digital media, including video games and social media

With practical guidance on writing scholarly critiques of your own work and a glossary of terms for ease of reference, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing is an essential manual for any introductory creative writing course and a practical companion for more advanced writers.

In Phase Media, James Ash theorizes how smart objects, understood as Internet-connected and sensor-enabled devices, are altering users' experience of their environment. Rather than networks connected by lines of transmission, smart objects generate phases, understood as space-times that modulate the spatio-temporal intelligibility of both humans and non-humans. Examining a range of objects and services from the Apple Watch to Nest Cam to Uber, Ash suggests that the modulation of spatio-temporal intelligibility is partly shaped by the commercial logics of the industries that design and manufacture smart objects, but can also exceed them.

Drawing upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon and Bruno Latour, Ash argues that smart objects have their own phase politics, which offer opportunities for new forms of public to emerge. Phase Media develops a conceptual vocabulary to contend that smart objects do more than just enabling a world of increased corporate control and surveillance, as they also provide the tools to expose and re-order the very logics and procedures that created them.

The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather, it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet, shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with the contemporary world has led to television developing many different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization. The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the key to understanding secular magic on television and film and exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006 films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further questions about entertainment and how the relations between the program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of inter-medial relations.

Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers.

Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age.

Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures — from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media.

Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated — that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.