The treason of the new: the wrong timing of media change in contemporary culture

Abstract

Conceptually connecting the complex process of individualization that has been taking place for over two millennia of Western culture and its importance tends to be increasingly identified from within various streams of social science, with the notion of „user‟, which came into use with the studies and speeches on New Info-communications Technology. This notion reproduced a theoretical metaphor ideology and ideology representational technique which, from advertising, marketing or technophile exaltation of the new tradition (a tradition that doesn't fail to be modernist: Rosenberg, H., 1968 y Calinescu, M., 1991) and is assumed by discourses on technological forms that reduce the complexity of social phenomena. Both because the mainstream media against the social subject was and is not a ‘tabula rasa’, and because the changes introduced by the “phenomenology” of media convergence and integration of multimedia in the process of digitalization of text, images, sounds, words, and representational media coverage in the public space and social subjects are not quite new: these changes had already begun in the traditional media and its practices, representations and habits continue under the new settings in the computing environment. We believe it is the modernist tradition of the exaltation of novelty, which ends in its betrayal of the promise of technology and the course of its omnipresence.