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About the Book
“We live in an extraordinary time. Media capitalism is in crisis. Everything we are capable of making or dreaming can build new forms of communication that can recover its meaning: establishing relationships."
That can serve as the key to enter The End of Journalism and Other Good News, the new book from lavaca, presented as a hypothesis about the current moment in the history of communication.
The hypothesis that the book proposes is that, because of the crisis in media capitalism, the speed of technological, social, and political transformations are causing mutations and deterioration in the commercial media, while other styles, ways, and means are born of society to guarantee that expression, freedom and communication are not caught, deformed or ignored by the conventional media.
Among other topics, the book invites us think that what were generically called the mass-communication media have transformed “into something quite different: into mass opinion-formation media. Which is to say, into social control devices. We call this 'media capitalism,' and it is all about building power based on controlling, restricting and classifying information flows."
It also describes one of the most formidable social communication creations, the web, the global network of networks, which was not the product of any enterprise or government (on the contrary, they always arrived late at every step, or directly opposed it), but was driven by the social need to share information within the new relationships its creators have with work, time, money, learning and ethics. It discusses who hackers are in reality, and how the information age can be understood as a totally different paradigm the commercial.
On a dizzying trip, the book visits Italo Calvino, Zygmun Bauman, Pierre Bordieu, the struggles of social movements, and the findings of information science, as ways to understand the genetics of the communication of these times, in which it is proposed (as the Situations Collective suggests) that even the concept of “old” and “new” should be seen from a perspective that doesn't have to do with “ancient” and “recent,” but with the ability to create and produce.
The End of Journalism and Other Good News also reflects critically on notions such as the “alternative media,” to the extent that they are fossilized as spreaders of opinion and propaganda when they are close to traditional ideological organizations.
And it proposes other ways to understand the options and opportunities that these times present: values, resources, ideas, ways of organizing and creating.
About the Author
La Vaca is a social communication medium we felt the need to create in the year 2001. Our first reports were sent by electronic mail to a hundred addresses. Then, the page www.lavaca.org was born with a slogan: anticopyright. Since then, every week, through chronicles and reports, we have been learning to provide information on social experiences we have chosen to accompany, not in the fleeting generation of news, but through the long, rich process of creating altematives.