Realismo urbano

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Las estaciones y el cine

El verano blanco y tórrido, decía Baudelaire. La autora se pregunta ¿Hay estaciones en el cine?. Hay películas de estío, aunque transcurran en primavera; hay westerns abrasadores y, aún así, decembrinos; hay navidades en blanco y negro de solsticio desconocido. Para concluir que no. No, no hay estaciones en el (buen) cine. Sólo una, se llama: Acción

No es lo mismo una marca que una marca

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Acerca de la plenitud teórica de conceptos en oportuno desuso. ¿Qué se hizo de las masas? Whatever happened to the masses? Theoretically valid concepts in convenient disuse

El concepto "masa", central en las teorías sobre los medios de comunicación durante décadas, parece haber desaparecido del repertorio de conceptos útiles para explicar el funcionamiento de los medios de masas en las democracias capitalistas contemporáneas. Sin embargo, consideramos que este silenciamiento poco tiene que ver con la pérdida de sentido teórico del concepto "masa" o con su superación y consecuente sustituciónThe concept of “masses”, so central to theories about media for decades, seems to have disappeared from the repertoire of concepts used to explain how mass media works in contemporary capitalist democracies. Nonetheless, we feel that this silence does not weaken the theoretical concept of “masses”; nor does it mean that this concept has disappeared or been substituted by anything elsePublicad

10+1 remarks on participation & the media (guest blog)

We all love public participation in media don’t we? From Dan Gillmor’s ‘We The Media’ to Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Come’s Everybody’ via Wikipedia and the Guardian’s Open Journalism, it’s been seen as a lovely thing for both the industry and the citizen. I call my version of it Networked Journalism. But is it really working? Have we over-expected? Do we (the professional) really embrace sharing? Pilar Carrera is a media lecturer at Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III studying participatory journalism who is currently a visiting fellow at my Department at the LSE. Here is her (tongue-in-cheek) set of questions we should ask ourselves about the “hype-Internet fueled unidirectional mass media trauma” we call ‘PARTICIPATION’. Apocalyptic or utopian or just “nothing new under the sun”

Buñuel, el expectante. Acerca de "El ángel exterminador" o el irresistible encanto de la interioridad

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The moviemaker who came in from the cold (Vico-Visión)

En el año 2004 Aki Kaurismäki rueda Bico, un corto de 5 minutos para una obra colectiva titulada Visions of Europe. En este aparente documental, rodado bajo el signo del Inferno de Strindberg y los ecos de Las Hurdes, la frontera entre el relato y el documento se desdibuja, fragmentos textuales salen de debajo de las piedras y el método Rubens alcanza cierto grado de perfección fílmica.In 2004 Aki Kaurismäki directed Bico, a short 5 minutes film conceived as a segment of a collective work entitled Visions of Europe. In this documentary film, shoot under the sign of Strindberg’s Inferno and the echoes of Las Hurdes, the line between tale and factual blurs, and we see fragments of stories emerging from under the rocks and Ruben’s method achieves a degree of cinematic perfection.Publicad

Digital interiors. The Internet Housing Policies Meet the Age of Confinement

One of the main characteristics of today?s private and intimate environments is that they are completely pervaded by mass media, and more specifically by the spider?s web of the Internet. Through the Internet, we incessantly generate mappable traces of our opinions, desires, will, preferences, values, interests, fears, mindsets and moods, concerns, etc. If we take a quick look at our relationship with mass media screens and interfaces throughout the 20th century up to the present day, we can easily appreciate how the trend has been a sustained and progressive reduction in both physical and symbolic distance and an increasing sophistication in the forms of control through mass media technology as they have steadily penetrated the private and intimate spaces of the individual. This article analyzes some of the consequences of the increasing loss of symbolic and physical distance with mass media and informational technologies. The confinement caused by COVID-19 has led to an unprecedented restriction of public freedoms in countries with a long democratic tradition, combined with the generalization of legitimate and imperious digital surveillance undertaken in the name of the «public interest» especially through smartphones. It is the perfect example of an encapsulated and strictly media- controlled privacy accompanied by a massive, extensive and frenetic use of the Internet as the only window «open to the outside world» and the only means of contact as vicarious as it is frustrating with the other. The COVID-19 crisis has permitted the foreshadowing of the true dimension of the Internet in terms of control and social engineering, following decades of adaptation, interiorization and massive adoption of the medium by the citizenry. In this perfect storm in which two viral natures collided (that of the internet and that of COVID-19), the structural links between the Internet and socio-political isolation have become clear