META-REFERENTIAL REALITY IN THE ABYSS OF MEDIA IMAGES AND THEORIES

Abstract

McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message”, made at the time of the expansion of television in the 1960s, was confirmed by the advent of the Internet, social media platforms and the digital transformation of modern society. The media form encircles the recipients, becoming an environment more real than reality, much like Baudrillard’s simulacrum. “Immersed” in a media kaleidoscope in which “pictures within a picture” are endlessly multiplied, users find it increasingly difficult to distinguish facts from interpretations, facts from factoids, lost like “Alice in Wonderland” in the virtual space of never-ending stories. Technological progress has preserved all the old media, while producing new ones, in a way similar to the Russian “matryoshka dolls”, but has pushed the truth and moral dilemmas into the background. Entertainment has become the main media content, information is delivered in the “infotainment” form, with the rapid succession of images as a popularized “montage of attractions”. Marx’s fascination with machines and productive forces as grounds of a “social existence that determines men’s consciousness” has undergone an unusual inversion: the media production represents and creates a worldview in a much more sophisticated way than heavy industry, which as a relic of the past becomes an ecological threat to humanity and the planet. “Reality”, the one word that, at the insistence of writer Nabokov, should always appear in quotation marks, is an astonishing artifact of the media and their powerful masters, and the Earth itself has been utilized as Duchamp’s “readymade”, thus becoming an artwork subjected to relentless exploitation for profit. Mastering Manovich’s “language of new media” is necessary for understanding modern information and visual culture, in order to make communication between people possible at all, because the contemporary culture is meta-referential and self-centered. A critical understanding of the world, which requires media literacy and continuous media education, is the only way to avoid complicity in the collapse of reality under the weight of media images that erase the boundaries between reality and fiction, facts and theoretical interpretations.