The fiction as reality

The XXXII Blanquerna Days Conference, to be held on 9, 10 and 11 March, is dedicated this year to the debate — or the clash, depending on how you look at it — between fiction and reality, a key issue for future professionals in Communication and International Relations.

New ways of communicating increasingly rely on strategies that use fiction to represent reality — sometimes in a transparent or playful way, as a provocative device, and at other times as a form of deception, using fake news and other tactics that appeal to an audience that increasingly prefers immediacy to certainty.

For this reason, it is more necessary than ever to be able to discern fact from fiction, and it is essential to understand how the mechanisms of fiction work. At a time when virtual realities and the growing capacity of AI to generate convincing content are increasingly calling our perceptions into question, humanism more than ever takes on the task of helping us distinguish between different degrees of credibility. This is essential for communication professionals, who need to recognise when we are representing reality and when we are subverting it through fiction — and when fiction helps us understand reality better, even if reality all too often can seem like a fiction.