the mass media and their relationship with the postmodern culture

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ebellious postures that, up to date, have not been in a position toreach the high grade of radicalization of Modernism.Perhaps the hallmark of this time has been to take care of technocracy(in one hand ), against the development of warmer and more stablishedhuman being relationships ( in the other hand ).So we can see thefollowing paradox : young people (childs and adolescents ) who becamespecialists in to disguise their deepest feelings and , particulary,their empty feelings. They, often commite suicide attempts in theframe of a disfunctional family with emotionally aloof and distantnarcissistic bonds (many times in narcissistic and histrionicpersonality disorders ).But, those families may pay, frequently,expensive and sofisticated treatments of medical carefulness andrehabilitation.Thus, when those young people come back to their home,find again a "nest" without cre and warm. So they must facetheir empty feelings and to seek other "partners" like the Media , forexample. Many times they meet in TV series or movies the pssibilityof an identification with postmodern adolescents character ( likethemselves ) who indirectly " invite " to steal something or to cuttheir necks or wrists. This behavior is "teaching", let us say, everymorning or afternoon. The characters say how to do it and what kind of"tool" could be used.In a TV movy about a group of young women very fond of magic, one ofthem manifestated her intention to buy a book about " white magic ",but also comunicate to her partners the impossibility of do it forlack of money. A group mate told her : " ¡It doesn ·t matter. We havefive fingers disscount!", ( in allusion of a stealing ), and lateradded : " All the humanity and even the animals do it ! ".Thisexample, show us how , consciously or unconsciously, the Post ModernSociety try to teach a suicide of itself. In the following paragraphswe will intend to reflect and to think about this idea and the sourceswho inspired this paper.After WWII, different authors told us that a new type of society hadarisen, and, according to them, this new type has been called postindustrialsociety, consumerism society, multinational capitalism,neocapitalism, wild capitalism, massmedia-driven society, and so on.Names that, indeed, point out to a characteristic differing from thecharacteristic the former period was endowed with. Currently, socialclasses as they had been devised by the industrial society are nolonger valid. Conflicts do not arise among classes any longer, theyarise between people and the establishment -i.e. huge organiztionswherein power does not depend of any social class but is exerted bygovernments and bureaucracy. This implies a fragmentation of theaction that, before, was amalgamated into social classes -hence, wecannot talk about exploitation any longer, we have to mention analignment, a consequence of a super-adaptation to the system through amanipulation of the Massmedia Culture that controls the "apparatus"..We could say that this new order brings about the demise of theculture monopoly caused by the major countries of the western world.This, coupled to the arising of the culture of countries pertaining tothe so-called Third World that had been damaged by the European modeland the arising of the so-called sub-cultures thanks to antiestablishmentmovements. That is, progress based on science andtechnique is suffering a deep crisis. followed by a simultaneouscrisissuffered by several elements pertaining to the Culture of Modernism,namely: the cultural unity (as regards the universal values of itsproposals, the authority of scientific rationality -i.e. the
intrinsical goodness of technology, the rational foundation of anyaesthetic model. All this leads to a de-categorization, so to speak;that is, being prone to a fragmentation against the cultural patternsuniversalization promoted by the mass media while evidencing a pseudogoodnessthat manipulates us.Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extension ofMan, proposes a great many statements -there is one, however, that Iconsider to be fundamental: the message is the mean -that is, from myown perspective, this statement induces us to think that reality isboth positive and human, and that all the "setting" surrounding uslends some tonality to life.Anyhow, I would like to clarify that, even though I have a deeprespect for this author I disagree with him at times. Now, if wefollow a research conducted by Oscar Masotta about a correlationbetween the mass media and the artistic activity we can observe somepoints: for one thing, worldwide, the manufacture of TV sets, sincetheir mass irruption in 1948, has reached astronomical figures. Now,let's consider the style of two creators, Ranschenberg and Tinguely(in the 50s and early 60s), a style called super-realism thatincorporates what we could call a market-oriented super communicationor the over saturation of consumerism and, from a certain point ofview denounces the underlying authoritarianism by alerting usagainst it. If we follow this trend of thought, we could reach thecamp works of art: they have to do with a naïve style endowed with acertain caricature of Romanticism due to a constant inversion ofvalues, the conversion of bad taste into good taste, a style thatmakes fun of everything serious, with a touch of a somewhat decayedinnocence, and a rather frivolous judgment. In other words, we caninfer that this "new aesthetic object" is bound to constitute a newand original message on the one hand as well as allowing an inspectionto be performed about the conditions ruling the way any message isconstituted, on the other hand.Whenever we deal with the mass media, and the mass media entourage itis like trying to either work with music, computing, poetry oroperating within criticism itself by means of informatic models. AsUmberto Eco would say "both the notions about the number ofinformation, and antropy become inseparable".So, we must have a critical posture, we must analyze contents, analyzethe idea that, within any communication-related situation not only thevisible contents are simply forwarded but also it should be noted thatthose contents are "articulated" -that is, they form part ofstructures that are unlikely to be visibleNow, if the communication process is something else than simplytransmissing the signifié of concepts, this is because there exists anefficacious "size" of the signifier inasmuch as the message forwardingprocesses include either a fundamental sense, that is the messageproper, or a sign devoid of a specific material substrate because thissubstrate reacts upon both the very concept and outside the concept aswell -and this is why that substrate is efficacious with regard tobehavior.As Oscar Massotta put it: "Grasping any message could become adifferential process with regard to the qualitative characteristics ofthe channel involved, and the appearance of any new medium could causea progress or a change in the discrimination grade of differences".Anibal Ford states that refraining from confusing the study of the
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