Archive for: Philosophy of Media

The text puts into focus the changing nature, dramatic actuality and expanded (bio-ethical) meaning of the suicidal phenomenon as a global cultural and media symptom of the first decade of the 21st century. Starting from radical examples of a suicidal protest as a political death ritual (the nature of which is here conceived by victims’ struggle for freedom, respect of human rights and emancipation of the oppressed working-class people), the analysis is supported by theoretical backgrounds among which the most remarkable place has been reserved for a study about the history of self-immolation by the British sociologist Michael Biggs. The text attempts to open up new fields of interpretation bordering the phenomenon of the image, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of suicide, on the other, in the context of contemporary everyday life and media culture under the globalization regime. One of the main goals, towards which this re-articulation of suicide as an ultimate cultural symptom of our times has developed, resides in the need to re-examine the complicity between the iconography of death (as a consequence of the radical self-destructive ritual) and the new imaginary of the ‘political’.

Illustrated press in the SFRY 1945 to 1980 marks the political rule of Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Party and represents a conglomerate of visual and narrative contents, with a significant role in establishing and popularizing socialism and the development of popular culture. Visualized news, trends and propaganda represented the experimental field of regime’s occasional indulgence, indicated the shifting of behavioral boundaries and changing of the everyday life philosophy. The same thematic contents of magazines allowed differentiation of several dominant phenomena, which provided the emphasizing of the best visual testimonies of political, social and cultural reality of the socialist period, and the changes the society was undergoing. Photographs from the cover pages were indicators of regime’s agitation and propaganda in the first years after the World War II, which already in the early fifties began to indicate social change, the relative liberality of the Yugoslav regime, in the same time being a response to the audience pressures. The starting hypothesis is that the illustrated press, as a mass medium, was a carrier of information and entertainment, as well as it was an integral part of mass culture, in which the dogmatic influences of the East and the West intertwined throughout the 1945-1980 entire period. Since the end of the fifties, a modernized illustrated press supported the new trends and improvement in everyday life, whereby it participated in the westernization of society. The aim of this exposition is to present the possible cultural and socio-political interpretation of the illustrated press as a mass medium in the service of daily political needs, but also as a carrier of visual representations of changes in the perception of everyday life and popular culture.

The post-modern society often pulsates to the beat of dynamic transformation of political, economic crisis, technological revolution, climate changes, terrorist attacks, media appearances and global spectacles. The concept of public space adapts to the character and philosophy of new media, creating abundance of information that are getting more and more important social role. Bad news, disinformation, data conversion and ideologically driven interpretation are a part of the current media discourse, which favors fear as merchandise in demand on the information market. Staging of communication leads to the abolition of sense, homeopathic grafting of the moral panic that is oversized compared to the facts of the subject basis. (Re) construction of reality is based on the creation of meaning that comes from the social environment, ideas, symbols and images that dominate in a particular place and time. The reality is more and more a product of media meanings we are giving it. The authors examine the phenomenon of fear, especially the symbiosis of political actors and the mass media, using market uniformity to feed the hunger of the already anxious audience.

Common to all formats of reality shows broadcasted in Serbia (Farm, Palace, Survivor, Big Brother VIP …) is their identification of public and private discourse in the real-time of the “story” (dijegetic time, in contrast to film time). The paper analyzes the corpus of the third season of Farm on TV PINK. Material is consisted of 7 day reviews: Sunday 28, Monday 29, Tuesday 30, November and Wendesday 1, Thursday 2, Friday 3, and Saturday 4 of December 2010; or the 76th, the 77th, the 78th, the 79th, the 80th, 81st and the 82nd day of the third broadcast cycle of the Farm on TV Pink. The aim was to observe the discourse strategies which in television broadcast void the boundary between private and public discourse, delivering the public content of reality shows to the viewers’ private domain. The audience is thus placed in the position of consumer of a mass media content bereft of any public interest element, which is not meant to be a media spectacle. Its aim is to deconstruct the implicit message this discourse delivers to its numerous audience, and put themselves into the context of professional ethical code of journalists.