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Laura Álvarez Trigo

Laura Álvarez Trigo
laura.alvarezt@edu.uah.es
Twitter

Areas of expertise: Popular media and audiovisual culture, feminism

PhD candidate in American Studies @ Instituto Franklin–UAH.
BA in Communication, MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature, MA in Teaching, and postgraduate qualification as Gender Equality Promoter. I am currently a PhD candidate in American Studies at Instituto Franklin–UAH and I am writing my thesis on the connection between Media Theory and Don DeLillo. My research interests focus on postmodernist American Literature, Media Theory, Feminism and Fan Culture.

 

PopMeC section: digital & new media

This section aims to spark a conversation about communication and popular culture in terms of our digital lives. Its central objective is to explore how media knowledge and information work in our current social context. Contrary to what happens with traditional media, it is now far easier to determine the intention of active audiences and, as a consequence, to explore how information is repackaged and disseminated. The advantages of new media, it has been argued, can potentially encourage cultural and social change by fostering both access to information and facilitating public discussion. However, not everything is unicorns and rainbows. There is also an increasing concern with individual privacy, as well as with a threat to the status quo that hacking collectives and the deep web represent. In this same vein, the growing interest in data science is also worth mentioning, which entails the development of algorithms that are invariably fed data sets with inherent bias, arising concerns about gender and racial discrimination.
The milieu that digital and new media create in our lives constitutes indeed a new world that can be explored through the emotional networks that are created beyond the boundaries of physical constraints; the persistent fluctuation of interests, modes of learning and remembering; and the increasing importance of visual culture and literacy. The Digital and New Media Section welcomes contributions that focus on the cultural and social factors that revolve around digital forms of communication and dissemination of popular culture, as well as those phenomena that depend upon the particular dynamics of the Internet. We search for fresh research dealing with all these issues pertaining to this new media landscape, focusing, among others things on social media and online communities such as fandom, creations that are specific to the digital world such as YouTube/TikTok videos, podcasts and any other content from similar digital platforms.

“Don’t you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.”
Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006)