At a crab's pace

Name: At a crab's pace
Brand: Totvsrj-record-dc
SKU: 9788501076823
Price: 94.90 BRL
Availability: InStock

Hot Wars and Media Populism

Autor: Umberto Eco

Conteúdo do livro

CÓDIGO DA OBRA9788501076823

Sinopse

A Crab's Pace brings together writings by Umberto Eco on the political and media events that influenced the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

The texts in this "A Crab's Pace" highlight the dramatic changes that have occurred in world politics since the end of the last millennium. With the end of the Cold War, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq brought the return of combative or hot war; a new season of "crusades" began, with the clash between Islam and Christianity; Christian fundamentalisms that seemed to belong to the chronicles of the 19th century reappeared, with the revival of anti-Darwinist polemics; the specter of the Yellow Peril resurfaced (albeit in demographic and economic guise); anti-Semitism returned triumphant; and neo-fascists seized power in several countries.

What led us to this era of hot wars and media populism, and how was it sold as progress? Eco discusses topics such as racism, mythology, rhetoric, the European Union, the Middle East, technology, 9/11, medieval heritage, television commercials, globalization, Harry Potter , anti-Semitism, logic, the Tower of Babel, fundamentalism, The Da Vinci Code , magical thinking, and so on. The author shows us his side, more attached to everyday life and, at the same time, engaged: an intellectual involved in both local and global events, and a man concerned with politics, education, ethics, and the direction humanity is taking.

Times are dark, customs are corrupt, and even the right to criticize is stifled by forms of censorship or popular fury. It seems that history, frenetic with the leaps made in the previous two millennia, has moved backward, marching swiftly at a crab's pace. This book aims not so much to move forward, but to halt, at least somewhat, this retrograde movement.

"Many retrographic phenomena will emerge from the articles in this book, enough, in short, to justify the title. But without a doubt, something new, at least in our country, happened; something that had not happened before: the establishment of a form of government based on populist appeals through the media, perpetrated by a private company focused on its own private interests—a certainly new experiment, at least in the European scenario, and much smarter and more technologically advanced than the populisms of the Third World.

Many of these writings are dedicated to this theme, born from the concern and indignation of this New that Advances, which (at least while I am printing these lines) it is not known if it will be possible to stop.”