Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Mediatization and journalism 51 Strictly speaking, there is no such “public opinion” (which is confused with common sense or with formations of ideological consensus) except as a fiction of political liberalism erected by institutional mechanisms. The free press is born as a corollary of the modern institution of the liberal-democratic consensus. Even if it were structured in business (therefore, with commercial objectives), the “institution” side would prevail ideologically over the “organization” side. But this institutionalization is in crisis with the neolib- eral reorganization of the current mode of production and forms of life. First, the scope of the national State diminishes; second, the free market and financial globalization overlap to the logic of political society (relations between government and politi- cal parties). Public opinion becomes “liberal-census” under the control of assessment instruments, and organizational entities become more socially visible and technologically more pow- erful in the exercise of that “echo chamber, which is the hege- mony implicit in the media ecosystem. In this new conjuncture, the retraction or crisis of the public dialectic of the truth may invest itself with regressive characteristics, analogous to some that punctuated the fascist situations in the first half of the 20th century: fundamentalism, party irrationalism, racial exaspera- tion, aversion to the slow temporality of democratic processes, unorthodox praise of business effectiveness, etc. It is what we are experiencing now.