Mediatized Sapiens: Communicational knowledge

The Communicational Construction of Reality 31 because it meant the introduction of typography, which changed a little the way people started to relate to their worlds. Typog- raphy brought the reproduction of books and reading material as a whole, not only religious but also political, cultural, ideological, in short. And it would also shape minds as it would, so to speak, restructure the way people looked at the world and the texts themselves. It means that there would be a basic change in society its W el h f. at we have at that moment, after this passage, is an- other transformation, which introduced a new sensibility at that moment. This new sensitivity was characterized by Espinoza, by Leibniz, and marked its time and also provoked a break with the Cartesian thought of the time because it also introduced concepts that were outside the basic Cartesian model of thought. But the main change was not there, the main change occurred with the presence of the philosopher Nietzsche, who brought to these societies not only a critique of society itself, what he called decadence, but also, of course, to the critique of metaphysics, historicism, and Christianity, bringing new concepts, such as the concept of energy, the concept of color, and the concept of force. The very concept of spirit is, in a way, reintroduced here by Nietzsche, who somehow puts the Greek question back on the agend A a n . d this turn that marked the sensibility was one that also, in a certain way, prepared the ground for the revolutions that would come. These revolutions even preceded the presence of the philosopher and meant: the emergence of the people as a prominent political figure; the public sphere; journalism, and also recording and reproduction machines. These machines re- produced, in the Second Industrial Revolution, the images and sounds in movement through the photographic camera, the phonograph, and the cinema. It is clear that this would not leave society as before. They make the sensitivity transform. And the new question asked at that time was, exactly, what new sensibility is emerging here in this new context? But it doesn’t end here. We also have, at this moment, the unfolding of what happened in the 19th century, which was the emergence, in the 20th century, of the great mass media, which became prominent in political conduct and social struc-

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