Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Mediatization and journalism 49 that the parliamentary form could not mirror “popular sover- eignty” since public opinion would be artificially guided by the “hidden persuaders” of that time, that is, by radio and press, in the process of the organic renewal of the leading bloc. Inother contexts, amid thehistorical inertia of the social group, the political inanity of representationmay coexist with its pure legal form within the scope of an anti-constitutional power conducted by corporations with strict or expanded information control. Thus, today, in tune with the juridical-social order and exclusively oriented towards the market, the organization (cor- poration, company, industry) overlaps the institutional logic of the classic press. It has always been politically legitimized by the preservation of civil rights, freedom, and democracy, while se- miotically supported by a symbolic pact of transparency or veri- diction, that is, the communication of a consensual truth. For 19th-century jurist and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market”. Holmes was an American pragmatist accustomed to the competitive ideol- ogy of social Darwinism, but his sentence matches well with the struggle for hegemony (to convince, to persuade, to influence) in the modern public sphere. Exchanging this sphere for the word “market,” however, has something of a premonitory: the citizenship that today serves as a reference to this new histori- cal qualification of existence called media bios is basically con- sumer citizenship. The social becomes qualified by its consump - tion capability – it is what defines the public agenda, as well as restores the old typification of the “passive citizen”. To socialize would not be to politicize, but to consume. The individualistic conscience overlaps, in the public space, the political injunctions of social responsibility. In the current logic of the market, the truth is a reiter- ated product , not by liberal consensus, but by the inherent au- tomatism in the discursive circuit of media devices. Analogous to the formulation of Goebbels’ Nazi-fascist propaganda (“a lie a thousand times repeated becomes true”), the truth is like a nail hammered into a wall. But outside the scope of classic advertise- ment, that is, the intention to inculcate a supposedly true point of view, the current game of market and network gets consti-