Digitally hyperconnected, and increasingly techno-dependent, humanity travels on a high-speed train called the Internet. Still not sure where heading, how to stop, change course, or pause in one of the infinite
stations that make up cyberspace. However, despite to this initial
bewilderment and to setbacks such as that of Cambridge Analytica in 2018, the average netizen doesn’t
seem to have any intention of backing down or
stop midway, despite how uncertain it is. At least to short and medium
term there are no plans to buy the return ticket.
In this way, prisoners of notifications, big
data, excess information and fake news, the current
times are moving away from the retrotopia proposed by Zygmunt Bauman to correct the course or, from an even
more pessimistic view, illuminate the path to
the abyss. The Internet is already immersed in our way of living and
connect with others (and with ourselves).
We use it for everything –or almost everything– with the naturalness that newcomers do not have. Nathan Jurgenson seems be right: «today the online and offline realities are one, with the good and bad that this entails».
Faced with this new symbiotic analog-digital existence, which from the academy
demands understanding and analysis, the journal Correspondencias & Análisis presents its fifteenth edition, with
articles that delve into problems arising from the broad domain of the Internet and the exercise of communication,
such as are citizen participation
and social networks of governments in Latin America and Europe; the naturalization of sexism in popular fiction
series; the content
audiovisual and its link with
advertising; and travel
journalism from the vision and the pen of two prestigious writers.
In these pages, readers
will find some answers as a product
of the study on issues
of this nature and, in addition, new questions
are raised about the present and its complexities.
Mg.
Rafael Robles Olivos
Coordinator
of Communication Sciences Research Institute
Faculty of Communication Sciences,
Tourism and Psychology – USMP