The Mass Media: Spokesmen of the Scientific and Technological Apparatus

• Main Author: Fulvio Šuran
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Center for Philosophy of Media and Media Research 2014-05-01
• Series: In Medias Res
• Subjects: mass media; mass culture; standardization; atomization. Scientific-technological Apparatus; tautological communication; public opinion; the world as representation; world codification; media conditioning
• Online Access: http://www.centar-fm.org/inmediasres/images/pdf/4/Fulvio%20Suran%20-%20Masmediji%20-%20glasogovornici%20znanstveno-tehnoloskog%20aparata.pdf

The dominant scientific-technological apparatus has brought the world to a big and inexorable inversion of all values, as from simple means in the hands of man; it has become a self-functioning apparatus which includes man as its official. This matter, generalized and extended to the whole world of technique, applies also to the mass media, as their spokesman (Stuart Wilde). Mass media evolving from simple instruments and becoming a separate reality of their own. It is a radical change, as each computerized mass media represents only one part of the “web” which, in the function of “mega apparatus” or “cyberspace» “, is in fact a separate world, within which there is no freedom to act, except for that of following its rules, as beforehand conditioning, just to be somebody in the world. This inversion of the media into aims clearly brings also an anthropological transformation caused by the mass media themselves. Man, in fact, is not a “something” granted by its being; his existence in the world depends also on the way he manipulates the surrounding reality, so that not only the mass media transform themselves, but man himself does. And this happens independently on how he uses the media or on the aims he wants to achieve when using them. In fact, we are facing the birth of a new kind of man: the technological man.