MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA

MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA
The media is an impersonal deity of the Western society,
being worshipped by those who are, or are considered, masters or
rulers. (...) They are their collective authority which acts
as an absolute rule towards each and every one. For the power
of the church in the feudal era was not only rested on a relatively
small number of priests, but upon the whole population,
who accepted the Church, and who inserted in it the bits
of their alienated “self”.
(Alexander Zinoviev, 2002)
Instead of the United Nations, an organization
appeared called the United Coca Cola.
(Ulrich Beck, 2003)
Morin’s valorizations of the mass culture being the embryo of the
religion are perhaps exaggerated and pretentious, and Zinoviev’s
valorizations that the media is an impersonal deity of Western society
which strives towards a new “ontology”, or even “theology” of mass
culture and mass media, but the fact that both phenomena have implicit
religious dimensions is undeniable. The way the fables, legends, stories,
and especially computer visualization of various beliefs in miracles,
apocalypses, prophecies, deliverance, Judgment Day, or narratives about
negative utopias are presented, increasingly get shape of a secularized
religion. However, Morin himself, after carrying out a full analysis of
mass culture at the end of the 70’s of the 20 th century, eventually was
forced to admit that “mass culture cannot suppress or destroy religion
and the state.” 31 (underlined by D.S.)
Therefore, in its essence - laid in Morin’s terms - the mass media still
remains Olympics without athletes, mythology without myth, religion
without God, eternity without immortality, and Vatican without Jesus.
Despite the colorful neoliberal “packaging”, we continue to live in a time
of corporate capitalism as a mutation of the state capitalism; the mass
return towards authentic religious awareness, especially among young
people, is perhaps (?!) one of the ways of spiritual resistance to mass (un)
culture and its politicized, ideologized, indoctrinated, and corrupted
institutions and derivatives such as the mass media. 32
31 MOREN, E.: Duh vremena. I,II. Beograd : BIGZ, 1979.
32 Compare: CHOMSKY, N.: Mediji, propaganda i sistem. Zagreb: Društvo
za promicanje književnosti na novim medijima, 2002; BECK, U.: Што е
глобализација? Скопје: Тера магика, 2003.
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