Mass media, elections and new reality

Viktor Burlachuk - doctor of sciences in sociology, leading research fellow at the department of sociology of culture and mass communication at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv.

Abstract. In the media age, such fundamental concepts as “subject”, “power”, “sign”, “meaning”, on which the picture of the modern world was built, underwent dramatic changes. The election process in our country has shown how the post-modern sociology has become relevant agents of the modern political process. Television, the media are becoming a genuine space of human habitation, which requires new principles of orientation. In this case, the traditional means of orientation in space and time disappear. In the world of mass media, the linear sequence is canceled, the dialectic polarity is canceled, the opposition of the subject and the object is canceled. Any event, action, value, social institution, falling into the scope of a system in which there is no linear sequence, undergoes a certain deformation. This also applies to the authorities, which no longer belong to the order of the legislative and supervisory authority, but rather to the order of tactility and switching. We need to understand what is happening with the public space of politics and social, how the dissolution of television in life, as well as the dissolution of life in television happens, how in the space of the media the power is disorganized, turns into a simulation of power, losing touch with goals and objectives and dooming yourself to produce power effects. The sphere of simulation is contained in the media, in the field of communication. It is necessary to start studying this area from the most important, from the theory of signs. The process of creating value and value correlates with the process of signification. In particular, the subject of modern political economy is not a commodity and not a sign, but their indissoluble unity in which they are destroyed as particular definitions, but not as a form. Any attempt to overcome the political economy of the sign, relying on one of its components, is doomed to reproduce the arbitrariness of the sign. Therefore, a symbolic semantic operation should come to replace the sign.

Keywords: mass media, power, panoptic space, event, reality, communication, virtuality.

Full article: ukr | rus

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Mass media, Elections and New Reality

stmm. 2019 (4): 90-105

UDC 316.254

DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/sociology2019.04.090