Pedro Lozano Bartolozzi: "We are going back to the oral era; we give more importance to sound and short messages than to reading and reflection".

"What better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a book than with another one? This is how Pedro Lozano Bartolozzi (Pamplona, 1939), journalist and Professor Emeritus of the School of Communication at the University of Navarra, explains the launch of his new work, "Código PIN". With this work, which makes the issue 32, he wants to pay tribute to the first one, "El Ecosistema Informativo", turned into reference letter academic by the term he used to describe and refer to the media: ecosystem.

"I was the first one to call it that. The name ecosystem was suggested to me by my wife, who is a biologist, because I told her that the media are living beings that live in society, they take out of it what they find striking and interesting and then give it back". She stresses that "facts are not loose in a vacuum, but placed in a kind of landscape. It is necessary to contextualize, and that is done by journalists. It is our advantage over the blogger or the one on network. It's not about talking about an event, but about situating it, explaining why it happens and what consequences it has".

The recent publication of "PIN Code" has prompted him to revisit topic media and reflect on the world of communications and his past as a teacher and researcher. 

The book delves into the world of technology and is loaded with criticism and parodies of this reality. "What is happening is a throwback to the oral era. Man began by the conquest of language: first with the voice and then in writing, as the Babylonian tablets attest. Now we are regressing even further: we give more importance to sound and short messages than to reflection and the reading of long texts. There is an evident process of giving priority to brevity, speed, instantaneousness over reflection, comprehension, effort to understand...". 

He explains that it is not the media that are to blame for this backlash, as they have traditionally been accused of. "The spectacle takes precedence. Even telephones are used to take pictures. It is a return to the image, as in the Altamira Caves. We have to recover the value of reading, teach young people to enjoy a good story".

"To write is to fight against time."

For Pedro Lozano, "writing is a fight against time". And to write about information and communication issues "is to fight against time with even more reason, because it is a fight against current events. I write to do something unusual: to become a historical text and not something ephemeral. Just as every writer fights against the oblivion that we will be, as the poet Héctor Abad Gómez said, in this way we maintain the knowledge and hand over to the new generations a bequest".

"PIN Code" mixes a journalist's own reflections on communication with fiction. "This has an explanation, and that is that it responds to two aspects of my own professional life as a journalist and as a teacher and, on the other hand, as a novelist and storyteller. It is not the first time I use the world of fantasy, of fiction. And questions of an imaginary world, with novelistic characters as it happens here".