Resumen de Awakening Fiction: The Cervantine Instrument at Work in Anti-Totalitarian Sci-Fi
- español
El reciente renacimiento de la ciencia ficción hunde sus raíces en el legado distópico de novelas como A Brave New World y 1984. Si fantasías distópicas como Black Mirror y Westworld ahondan en la exploración del efecto deshumanizador de nuevas tecnologías, en algunos casos estas exploraciones adoptan la forma de historias alternativas que nos alertan del peligro de socio-tecnologías totalitaristas. Este sería el caso de series televisivas como The Handmaid’s Tale y Man in the High Castle, así como de la película de bajo coste de Alex Rivera Traficante de sueños, que usan el terror de la misma forma que Cervantes usara la ironía para “despertar” a sus lectores.
- English
[...]in her highly publicized book The Death of Truth (2018), former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani made the point that the "truth decay" our society has been experiencing for decades (which the Rand Corporation described as the progressively "diminishing role of facts and analysis" in American public life) has accelerated in the last few years as a result of the rise of media platforms that are flooded with disinformation. While it is true that the spread of fake information by "bad actors" has contributed to the erosion of truth in our media environment, it is also important to recognize that what is new about the current situation is not necessarily the presence of fake or false information in the public sphere, but the speed with which this kind of disinformation travels in the digital age, and the inflationary effect of the siloed media that spreads it like wild fire in our market society (as Egginton and I have argued in Medialogies). Yet, given the scale of the current problems and the stakes we face as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century (the rise of racism, authoritarianism and misogyny, the crisis of democracy around the world, the threat of planetary devastation), these issues take on a renewed urgency today. [...]there seems to be a rapidly building consensus among information professionals, scientists, intellectuals, and educators that the fight against the plague of disinformation and the immobilizing stupor that comes with it is ultimately the fight for the future of humanity.
