Il secolo dei media. Riti abitudini mitologie

This book ideally continues the exploration opened by Mediastoria, published in 1995 and, in an enlarged edition, in 2002. While the center of that book was the historical dynamics of media and communication in the XIXth and XXth centuries, Il secolo dei media concentrates particularly on the latter century, from an anthropological point of view, and tries to understand the implications of a phenomenon that is very visible but that has been only sporadically made the object of serious study. This phenomenon is the huge quantitative growth of the media and of the messages they convey to our eyes, ears, minds. A quantity that does not find external limits (because, as the first part of the volume makes clear, “communication is never enough”) and that, in Hegel's expression, “passes into quality”, including the development of what the volumes defines “low intensity mythologies” and rituals taking the place of more ancient traditions. As the first part of the book makes clear, multiplication and repetition, in the realm of communication, imply many and contradictory effects, including the banalization of languages and genres, and at the same time the involvment of the reader/spectator into an immersive environment. The second part concentrates on what is defined “the silent fall of taboos”, a process strictly tied to both banalization and immersivity: on the one hand in analyzes the liberalization and the (almost) unlimited diffusion of pornography; on the other hand, an even less discussed phenomenon, the loss of meaning in our culture of oaths, a powerful ritual, consacrating the word itself, present in many different civilization. The third part of the book is dedicated to a re-definition of media as technologies and communication vehicles, going beyond the opposition of technical and social determinisms, and to three area studies in media history: the change in what we define as “news” and in their role in defining the world view particularly of urban dwellers (the city being the physical horizon of many communication forms supposedly autonomous from physical locations); the relation between spectators and professional sportspeople in mass sports; the strategic role of songs in popular culture.