Massimo Ragnedda, The Homo Mediaticus and the Paralysis of Critical Thought, in
After the end of Nazism and fascism and with the fall of the Soviet block, our society has been partly founded on the myth of the freedom of the press and the freedom of thought. Fear of an Orwellian society causes us to reject and oppose any imposition that comes from high up. The human loves to feel free to think, to act with full autonomy, completely emancipated from external influences. Paradoxically, now, never has the homologation in behaviour and in the ideas of individuals been so apparent, manifesting in the ways in which we dress, eat, and in our desires and aspiration, but, above all, there is homologation in the way we think. The totalitarian regimes could not impose thoughts by force. In contrast, such regimes are sources of critical thought. In an obvious absence freedom of expression, the human reacts, almost instinctively, with cognitive force, developing “critical thought” to reject the “System”; in other words, facing a coercively created homologation, the human answers with nonconformist critical thought. Paradoxically, today, it seems that with the freedom to express one’s own opinions, the human does not develop critical thought. There exists an “abstract force” which imposes its own laws and advances its supremacy on politics: the market. This has happened primarily because of what the Frankfurt scholars call “the culture industry”; a critical analysis of the economic and cultural context in which we live shows the risks derived from a serialized production of cultural products and commercialisation of art. As Debord shows, the risk of a paralysis of critical thought comes from the “society of the spectacle.” This article is divided into three parts. The first part will examine the illusion of pluralism, where in spite of a plurality of media, the ideas diffused are similar; they are different only in appearance and not in reality.
