Introduction: New Media and Hispanic Studies

There is comfort knowing that this introduction to a special number on new media and Hispanic studies will find its way into the seemingly stable, albeit archaic refuge of a paper journal. New media, defined by its dizzy array of delivery technologies, extensive capacities for visual manipulation, the rise of participatory cultures, information overload, immediacy, remediation, and the extensive convergence of old and new media, has led to a proliferation of creative practices, social connections, and artistic artifacts that beg for scholarly examination. As a field traditionally grounded in philology—and by extension in literature—Hispanism finds itself anxiously contemplating new territory. Even the recent rise of cinema studies and film—which soon may replace literature as the privileged (or at least most popular) artifact of the humanities—has not fully prepared us to deal with the technically bound, collectively generated, and visually rich creations that have recently emerged from Spain and Latin America. The development and wide scale implementation of new media has forced us to reconsider traditional categories of cultural production. As Reinaldo Laddaga warns in the opening essay in this number, if we are to follow the evolution of the arts, we must not only revise the validity of traditional literary categories, but also reevaluate the very concept of "the work," literary or otherwise. We can no longer focus our analytical attention solely on works written for the printing press, authored by single individuals, designed to circulate in fixed volumes and books. What we choose to call a "work" now must include everything from interactive web pages and online games to viral flash films and video podcasts.

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of new media is the extraordinary rise of participatory cultures whose members have been energized by the advent of powerful audio and visual technologies. At its best, new media allows individuals and groups to express themselves in ways hardly imaginable even twenty years ago. The availability of powerful software has blurred the traditional lines between professional and amateur and artist and fan, and in the case of video, it has even created an implosion of artistic production, allowing one individual to do what formerly required the collaboration of often hundreds of specialists. The case of Miguel Coyula, as described by Cristina Venegas in her article on digital cultures in Cuba, illustrates how a single individual working from his bedroom on a thread of a budget, using high school friends as actors, and exploiting the view from his window as his mise en scène, created a short film, Válvula de luz, which would later lead to his first feature, Red Cockroaches (2003). Miguel Coyula's work is not unique in this sense. Throughout Spain and Latin America, online digital film festivals, such as the Notodo film festival in Spain, have promoted the production of short cinematic works with low or no budgets, employing less than a handful of crew members and edited on home computers. These festivals point to a democratization of cinematographic and visual production and respond to the demands of glimpse, pop-up, and clip-based cultures. These cultures are decidedly adept at making do with the materials at hand, and exacting various forms of convergence between the technological tools of old and new media. Craig Epplin explores this aspect of new media in his essay on the Eloísa Cartonera group in Buenos Aires and similar groups in Lima, La Paz, Santiago and Mexico City, who construct unique cultural objects that enact a new form of production in times of institutional and economic crisis. As Epplin argues, these participatory cultures have led to new social imaginaries based on a convergence that enables a form of production containing both "the uniformity of mechanical reproduction and the fleetingness of digital culture."

Massive participation encouraged by new media is not without some troubling reverberations. Vicente Benet, in his essay "Excesos de memoria: el testimonio de la Guerra civil española y su articulación fílmica," points to the way new technologies have helped to produce an overwhelming participation in the recuperation of Civil War memories. But rather than accelerating...