Ricardo de Querol (Madrid, 1968), former director of Cinco Días, journalist for El País, is one of the most sensitive and sensitive people I know in this industry. His obsession with everything he does as a journalist and a citizen is to do good, to tell what he knows or sees or sees with simplicity and depth, as if he were a rare disease doctor. who he diagnosed with the best spirit to save the patient.
Now Querol has made it his mission to come to the rescue of an enigmatic disease with a question: What happened to the internet factories that seem to save humanity with their flawless designs? Are they on their way downhill with their billionaire futures, that is, now, like Carlos Gardel’s famous tango?
A famous graffiti found on a wall in Quito and discovered by poet Jorge Enrique Adoum surrounds the question of the future that was once the only future: “As we got the answers, the questions changed for us”. Querol discusses his book The Great Fragmentation with the same audacity as the graffiti artist, moving questions so that doubt is not a necessary invention.
In no case, throughout the text, neither the invention of the Internet, nor those of us who are currently using it by millions of people around the world, are to blame for the current crisis, which allows us to blame the Internet even for the contemporary crisis. tension, but we are approaching questions that were impossible to ask long ago.
When the Internet broke out and destroyed many of the traditional formulas of journalism, for example, we who might dare to doubt the unbridled power of invention were in fact branded as nostalgic doomsayers who wished the past to win over the future. . That, by the way, didn’t usually happen, but as Querol does throughout his book (258 pages of exciting revelation), it’s legitimate to wonder what has happened to cause even the untouchable Internet to now be devalued as a site. that would employ millions, and that’s laying off hundreds of thousands for now.
The Internet also failed to double the pulse of the book we read together, and just like Spain, it has a hard time beating the resisting newspaper printing houses (it’s cheaper in Spain, but that’s another issue). The papers of the books also resist in our homes Cinema is influenced by the wing because the broadcast platforms win the wars, but their weapon remains good scripts and good actors. No one has been able (or will make) inventions that have nothing to do with future perfection (e.g. theater), and the reading of the classics continues to be in the realm of the literary taste of the greats. Your grandfather also had an influence.
A vital book filled with Querol’s own speeches, written with the joy of counting not just as a journalist but as a witness who has seen the pros and cons of things that once seemed like I’d never go, among the newspaper plates. Any problems?
The author of The Great Fragmentation sometimes looks a bit like Pablo Neruda when he writes his famous irony about “nobody breaks/but they break things”. Some wondrous wonders of the Internet weren’t like that, they’re broken or can be broken, the miracle of that seemingly unfailing web, leaving some discoveries between us that can’t be overcome or take time to pass.