Untitled - socium.ge

30 Manuel Castellsintegrated by a diversified system of electronic media, including the Internet.Cultural expressions of all kinds are enclosed and shaped by this interlinked,electronic hypertext, formed by television, radio, print media, film, video, art,and Internet communication in the so-called “multimedia system” (Croteauand Hoynes, 2000).This multimedia system, even in its current state of oligopolistic businessconcentration, is not characterized by one-way messages to a mass audience.This was the mass culture of the industrial society. Media in the network societypresent a large variety of channels of communication, with increasinginteractivity. And they do not constitute the global village of a unified,Hollywood-centered culture. They are inclusive of a wide range of culturesand social groups, and send targeted messages to selected audiences or tospecific moods of an audience. The media system is characterized by globalbusiness concentration, by diversification of the audience (including culturaldiversification), by technological versatility and channel multiplicity, and bythe growing autonomy of an audience that is equipped with the Internet andhas learned the rules of the game: namely, everything that is a collectivemental experience is virtual, but this virtuality is a fundamental dimension ofeverybody’s reality.The enclosure of communication in the space of flexible, interactive, electronichypertext has a decisive effect on politics. Media have become thepublic space (Volkmer, 2003). The Habermasian vision of the constitution anddemocratic political institutions as the common ground of society, or theChicago School vision (unwittingly revived by Henri Lefebvre and RichardSennett) of the city as the public space of communication and social integration,has faded away. The commons of society are made of electronicnetworks, be it the media inherited from the mass media age, but deeply transformedby digitalization, or the new communication systems built in andaround the Internet. This is not to say that cities disappear or that face-to-faceinteraction is a relic of the past. In fact, we observe the opposite trend: themore communication happens in the electronic space, the more people asserttheir own culture and experience in their localities (Borja, 2003).However, local experience remains fragmented, customized, individualized.The socialization of society – the construction of a shared cultural practicethat allows individuals and social groups to live together (even in aconflictive togetherness) – takes place nowadays in the networked, digitized,interactive space of communication, centered around mass media and theInternet. Thus, the relationship between citizens and politicians, between therepresented and the representative, depends essentially on what happens in thismedia-centered communication space. Not that the media dictate politics andpolicies. But it is in the media space that political battles of all kinds arefought, won, and lost. Here, again, media politics works, as other instances of