Vol. 16 No. 7 (2024): Special Issue: Hybridizations and Transmediality between Fictional and Documentary Genres: Images and Critique of Post-Truth

Monograph coordinators:

Domingo Sánchez-Mesa (UGR),  ORCID 0000-0003-2242-4421

María José Sánchez Montes (UGR)  ORCID 0000-0002-0482-8230

The advent of information and communication technologies was hailed at the turn of the century as a historic opportunity for widespread access to information and knowledge in our modern societies: the utopia of an informed and rational citizenry. Almost at the edge of the second quarter of the 21st century, many of these promises seem chimerical with the increase in misinformation through social networks or the current crisis of trust in the veracity of information or in the relationship of representations based on image, sound, or audiovisual media. Although the phenomenon of the blurry relationship between reality and fiction is not entirely new and refers to discussions that in the West date back to the sophists or Platonic criticism of writing, it is legitimate to ask whether we are facing a real paradigm shift in this regard.

The critical-cultural perspective we propose from the FicTrans project focuses the analysis on the theoretical foundations and discourses that support both the recent "success" of the concept of post-truth and the set of rhetorical and discursive strategies that operate at the boundaries between fictional and factual genres, trying to explain or subvert dominant perceptions about these boundaries in the current context. This issue, therefore, proposes the critical study of the risks and opportunities emerging from the erasure and increasing loss of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, with a special focus on contemporary visual culture in its interrelation with the concept of post-truth and the concepts of intermediality or media hybridization.

On the other hand, as critical theories of mass media communication, new media, and digital cultures have taught us, fiction has always moved and played with border spaces between reality and the fictional construction of that reality. However, in the current visual and media culture, we find a proliferation of works where the hybridization between fiction and non-fiction becomes especially problematic and interesting from a theoretical and critical point of view. The emergence of AI-associated technologies has only exacerbated a trend already observable in the digital horizon of post-photography.

At the same time, a somewhat opposite phenomenon seems to occur: the increasing difficulty of reading fiction as such, leading not only to confusion of fictional characters and situations as if they were real or historical but also to the controversial and disconcerting phenomenon of new modes of fiction censorship. We understand that a theoretical and critical research effort is necessary on the role played by the hybridization of media and genres from the cultural and technological dynamics that affect inter- and transmedia practices in this context of oscillation between facts and fictions, with their associated discourses and genres.