Archive for: Philosophy of Media

The text is about the necessity of founding philosophy of media nowadays, working in collaboration or opposition to many contemporary theories of media that having different ideas, concepts and interpretations related to the unreflected media ontology. This unreflected media ontology is in fact ideology of our time, that philosophy of media should be reviewed. The question of founding philosophy of media is particularly given in the situation of intensive management of media wars, that could be prevent, understand, critically analyze, and solve in praxis with helping of this field of media studies.

According to the official research data of the AGB Nielsen (April, 2010) people in Serbia spend more time watching TV than any other nation in the world. Reality shows are among the most popular programs on televisions with national frequency. While most of these programs are franchises, RTV Pink, the most popular commercial television in Serbia, offered the audience in the region a reality show of its own called Dvor (The Palace). Although the reality programs have been broadcasted in Serbia since 2005 (Veliki brat, Operacija trijumf, Survivor, Farma, Parovi, 48 sati svadba, Menjam ženu, Ja imam talenat, Radna akcija, Domaćine, oženi se, Paklena kuhinja, Vreme je za bebe, Maldivi), the controversial reactions of the public and media regulatory bodies culminated during the broadcasting of Dvor. The aim of this paper is to find out why physical violence and explicit hate speach in Dvor provoked more reactions of the audience (approval and disapproval alike), print media (detailed daily reports of what happened in the program) and media experts and independent regulatory bodies than similar incidents in other reality shows. The general hypothesis is that Dvor was so popular because of its share in Pink’s program (more than 10 hours a day), as well as the fact that daily newspapers and magazines gave detailed reports of the events and participants of the show. The first particular hypothesis is that Dvor attracted great interest in the audience, but also in the media, simply because celebrities were the participants of the show. The second particular hypothesis is that the reactions and conclusions of the independаnt regulatory body – Republic Broadcasting Agency – after the incidents in this program, did not meet the expectations of media experts. The corpus of the study contains the selected fragments from the first (Ulazak) and last (Finale) episodes of the program, the situations in which physical violence and hate speech appeared, as well as the reactions of media experts in daily newspapers and magazines and the audience’s comments on the Internet forums and social networks.

Mitchell’s (2005) definition of metapicture appears as a term that includes a combination of television, literature, visual and musical arts, and the like, but also all forms of advertising (political and economic). Projected images fully mimic the process of mental representation in the human consciousness and their overlapping leads to blurring the boundaries between real and unreal. This phenomenon is intended to disturb the individual reasoning and induce him to accept the notion which is imposed on him. The modern media take on an educative role of traditional communities and create a new form of metapicture, consisting of a number of elements of different cultures and artistic genres, movements and pseudo events. In the contact with beings and new forms of reality man never before in his history met, except in the imagination and ecstatic visions, the ideas imposed through the screen lead to patterns of cognitive bias. However, metapictures are images that contain a specific depth and complexity, and require and attract attention. These are the pictures with the creative driving force which the work discuss.

What would Kierkegaard think of the internet? His critique of the press is surely well-known, as is his attempt to awaken authenticity in his contemporaries through his writing. Which one of these two tendencies would take presedence in his account of the internet? We will challenge Dreyfuss’ thesis that Kierkegaard would have hated the internet, arguing that the internet possesses possibilities of taking on what Dreyfuss calls “risky responsibility and obligations”, at least in as much as it is possible to take them on outside the internet. Finally, we will deploy a critique of that conception of cyber-obligations, which will at the same time be a critique of Kierkegaard’s conception of authenticity