The true power of the mass media

Abstract

At this end of the century - and of the millennium - we are persuaded to witness an evolution of such caliber in production systems, in technology and in the applications of science, in the emergence of new activities and professions, in the way in which societies themselves are configured ... that nothing seems to surprise us anymore and we have no qualms about setting deadlines for new technological discoveries or solutions for now incurable diseases. Naturally, justifiable optimism coexists with quasia-apocalyptic pessimisms: never so few had so much to the detriment of so many, so many human miseries could never be technically resolved - and were not wanted -, we never had a rigorous knowledge of the progressive destruction of the planet without putting an effective remedy. .. At this crossroads we can be convinced that what creates wealth is no longer the raw material (as in the pre-industrial era) or the transformation processes (as in the present about to expire), but the domain of information and of communication (telecommunications, computer applications for business and commerce, information technologies and free time, etc.) both in tools (hardware) and in their exploitation (software). As Manuel Castells (1998: 23) synthesizes in the prologue to his encyclopedic work:

"The information technology revolution and the restructuring of capitalism have induced a new form of society, the network society, which is characterized by the globalization of decisive economic activities from a strategic point of view, due to its form of organization in networks, by the flexibility and instability of work and its individualization, by a culture of real virtuality built through a system of omnipresent, interconnected and diversified media, and by the transformation of the material foundations of life, space and space. time, through the constitution of a space of flows and timeless time, as expressions of the dominant activities and of the ruling elites "