Editorial
One of the purposes of Actio has been to validate different forms of narrative, according to the principle
that it encompasses all we can understand. The way verbal and visual narratives suggest cognitive, educational, and
ludic objectives is increasingly fast and significant, expanding academic disciplines and leading to rethinking
present inter- or transdisciplinary conditions. Encouraging the spirit to explore new forms of narrative from the
popular and mass culture is an investigative and creative challenge. Hence, the need to experiment and meet the
needs arising from this challenge. This translates in a different engagement recognizing alternative forms of
knowledge with epistemological nuances, grades, perspectives, and versions that do not intend to solve, explain, or
conclude something, but to validate alternative narrative routes.
Undoubtedly, this is the time to weave an experimentalist orientation gathering the creative pluralism of our time
and recognizing the meaning crossings with which to confront a methodological tradition predominantly dominated by
the literary mode. It is a wager based on a provocative consciousness capable of facing the specific transformations
of a culture that, by evolving at a dizzying speed, is embedded in the mobile and fleeting offered by the
information and communication society.
The articles in this number have as a common denominator this clear intention of validating the fact that narrative
structures are present at the basis of various cultural and social realms and that experiencing them favors
processes of knowledge. The challenge faced by each author has been to find a different way to approach them, find
their modalities, recognize their expressive possibilities and, primarily, register the shades of meaning that
validate them as a way of uniting with and finding our way in the world. Each article is an experiment: it consists,
as Tim Ingolg says, in «trying things and seeing what happens». To articulate, define, and explicitate these new
things and situations show, on the one hand, an abandonment of that which we are used to recognize as valid in the
academic field, and, on the other hand, the opening of routes for understanding that supersedes the categorial
framework and integrates them as a living practice in language.
Of course, this challenging attitude coincides with the dynamism of our times, seeking to describe the narratives’
production of complex structures, variations, and decline, that have settled as cultural models embedded in our
daily surroundings, for instance, on television, films, or the internet. Today, the present’s narrative potential
leads to questions on sociability, forms of participation, and the methodological tradition. The narrative
incorporates technologies, things, discourses, and events from which dialogic and participative energies arise.
Thus, we could think we have entered a different phase in which the narrative is displaced towards a more
experimental horizon, the acceptance of which opens the door to other properties, competences, energies, and
modalities capable of generating new associations.
This number is dedicated to:
The nymph, as a representation of the feminine, has traveled through various artistic and cultural expressions
arriving now to the images with which some women represent themselves in Bumble. These images symbolize fantasy
horizons both men and women choose to appear attractive. In the case of some women, the nymph’s gestures are
repeated, and they are the means through which Bumble obtains information on its users to sell it as a product to
global companies and markets. The images in Bumble’s profiles are numerical, that is, they are made up of
mathematical formulas. Their rotation in a profile depends on an algorithm measuring the tastes and interests of all
Bumble’s users. This article integrates these reflections to a Bumble user’s account of her experience with this
social dating site.
From audiovisual communication, we find the synthesis of an investigation accounting for the virtual memory spaces
through the narrative analysis of the videogame Reconstrucción: la guerra no es un juego (Reconstruction:
war is not a game), with the intervention of Pathos audiovisual, expert in narrative development, and of the
Universidad Nacional de Colombia ViveLab Bogotá, that provided the development of digital content, available for
free download at Google Play, Appstore,
and Android. Its
author, Karen Johana Castelblanco Villamil, analyzes the results of a case study showing the political, cultural,
and historical dynamics of a social group, and the fight for public memories, in the light of categories such as
aesthetic memory, prosthetic memory, and retro-place. Communication technologies —videogames, web documentaries,
transmedia narratives, for instance— mediate social life and transfer memory spaces to virtuality, facilitating the
production of accounts and stories that challenge the official versions.
In this number of Actio we also find an important reflection and contribution by Alejandro Seba on the role
of sound in the film’s sound space and the clandestine detention centers in Argentina. Through the analysis of a
corpus including three films from different periods of Argentinian filmmaking, the author not only shows us how
sound design has evolved, but the importance of film and, specifically, of sound in processes involving the historic
memory of traumatic events such as a dictatorship. Thus, sound is established as an autonomous system of thought
that does not deserve to be subordinated to the image in the audiovisual context.
Finally, we have the article «Desired self-narratives by young Chines college students. Perceptions based on valued
products and services». From a quantitative and qualitative approach, authors Yuran Ren and Patrick W. Jordan
explore how products and services support the narratives of a specific population group, suggesting a methodological
approach for the creation of products and services supporting these narratives.
Having said this, we invite all our readers to enjoy this new number of Actio.
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