Media environment is now being shaped by two seemingly
contradictory trends: on the one hand, new technologies
have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded
the range of available delivery channels and enabled
consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate
media content in powerful new ways; on the other hand,
there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership
of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of
multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of
the entertainment industries (Jenkins, 2004: 2).
Today, media are controlled by powerful economic holdings that, with
the broadcast of images, are producing the (un)reality that we are assuming
and therefore are (in)directly guiding ideological and consumerist behaviours.
In other words, this phenomenon allows multinational corporate control over
the flow of information that the individual receives about the world in which
we live. To achieve this, the most important factor used by media in the
construction and transformation of (un)reality is the immersion of the
audience in the entertainment and spectacle displayed on the screens. In this
sense, the discourse first developed by Guy Debord (2000: 51-61) in the 1960s
about the society of spectacle is still valid today. According to Debord, our
media and consumer society is organized around the production and
consumption of images in which the real is presented as spectacle and the
spectacular as credible; the (con)fusion of reality and unreality thus becomes
characteristic of both spectacle itself and of the reception process.
Consequently, ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into
representation’ (Debord, 2000: 37). Spectacle is the end and the medium
through which audiences, via the use of visual technology, perceive the
(un)reality of the world and simultaneously block the perception of what is
not satisfying their perception: an unbalanced society with economic
inequality and political control.
The paradox that we find is that media were invented by humans and,
once they are developed, are re-inventing the perception of reality: ‘in films
and television we can find a curious and paradoxical phenomenon as they are
the perfect expression of a reality transformed with its own experience’
(Baecker, 1996: 567). Nowadays, with the introduction of digital imagery that
facilitates the transformation and generation of images, media use visual
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