During the last decades, literary and media studies have merged, and enriched themselves with tools originally belonging to other disciplines: Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Political Sciences, Musicology, and many others…
Out of their colaboration, in fact, a new discipline was born ─that of Cultural Studies, which builds upon the seminal idea, * that every cultural product and element, responds to a certain social need, and reflects ─in a certain way, too, our social reality.*

Under this multidisciplinarian umbrella, the careful and experienced analysis of popular fiction ─like that of Pedro Infante’s movies in Mexico, offers us a privileged channel to unveiling and understanding our deeper reality ─our “true reality”, as Carlos Bousoño would say.
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The present paper illustrates the point, better than a thick volume of theoretical frameworks.

An intense, vertiginous, hallucinating, …and absolutely partial video about social networks.
After reviewing what the digital age is bringing to our lives, the authors conclude triumphantly that the modelling force behind this revolution is people. They call it: Socialnomics (TM).
However, and through their own acceptance, it is not the people but consumption of those who are “connected”, which is presently modeling the digital society.
If consumption drives the internet, then, agendas model internet contents -not people. That is: If we keep in mind that people who do not buy or who choose not to buy, who are not connected or who choose not to be connected, are citizens, too, and worthy of their civil rights and our respect, as well.
In other words: People are not in command in the internet (and therefore in the new society that is being built upon it), any more -or any less, than in other media in our days.
Furthermore: We dare to conclude that presently, Socialnomics (TM) implies the substitution of ideals and ideologies we had grown to take into account, for the raw mercantilization of every aspect of our lives.
Only if we realize that this is going on, will we be able to really create a digital society that is good for every human being, that takes everyone –connected or not, into account.

But this video permits us to exercise our reading abilities, in order to go deeper and further than where its authors took us. And this is its true virtue.

The Digital Revolution (i.e.: the proliferation of the internet, personal computers, mobile/portable devices, etc.) is currently being blamed for the dramatic sales fall that traditional and electronic media are experiencing. This article, originally published in 1994, witnesses to the unfairness of this myth: The Internet was officially born in 1993, only one year before this article was written, and its reach in Mexico was still scarce at that time; yet media had already been losing sales and audiences steadily –for years in some cases, and for decades in others.

The fact is so evident that few –if any, of the media products’ sales recorded here (including a couple of national newspapers), ever recuperated their previous audiences, and many have disappeared altogether:

Contrary to professionally-generated mainstream-media contents, those internet’s contents that have been generated by the general audience (think of FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, e-mail chains and attachments, and the like), are majoritarianly “clean” (amiable in regards to the general audiences’ values, ideas and beliefs). And people are consuming them massively, close to the verge of addiction.

Society cannot possibly deliver mass media a more conclusive message, or put its case in a stronger way.
What are they waiting for to react accordingly…?

Few times do we talk about what the “message” of a literary work is, even amongst those of us who study literature. Finding out what the message is behind any human expression, however, is fundamental for surviving, as it allows us to filter what we are being told –to separate and retain what serves us, and to prevent us from falling prey to cheaters and liars.
Learning to see through information, allows us to make better use of media, too, without resorting to censorship or limiting our freedom of expression.

Evelyn, the movie (with Pierce Brosnan in the leading role), is a popular work, which was produced to help advance an unpopular political agenda amongst the general audience. The slant, the bias, the way reality was altered in it, in order to promote such agenda, is so great and evident, that it easily serves us to exemplify what a “message” is –what we are talking about; and to show how even a reality-based narration can be manipulated in order to fulfil a given goal.

This video gives way to multiple interpretations. What few people would comment on, however, is its gnostic origin. Signals are all around it: From the word Prometheus to the eye in the triangle; to the astounding initial statement that every human being is a god, and that through the internet he/she will become omnipresent, omnisapient (will know everything and all of us), and allmighty…
This kind of signals is key to decoding its message efficiently, and to take a knowing and responsible stance in regards to the phenomena we are living.

When we study colective aesthetics –like those modelling most popular and folk literatures, there is no way we can divorce the creator from his/her audience. Mass media, just like folk tales, feed precisely from this rich catalogue of cultural elements…