La gran mediatización (vol. 1) is the first instalment of an extensive essay -in two volumes- that the professor and researcher of communication and journalism, José Manuel Pérez Tornero, dedicates to the transformation that digital media, audiovisual platforms and social networks have imposed on our lives. The author devotes the book, which is over 400 pages long, to studying the progressive construction of the current media ecosystem. A construction that starts in the 70s of the twentieth century until the present day. A period in which we have experienced an initial massification produced by the extension of consumerist discourse, continuing with the digital tsunami, which has come with the Internet, the Web and, finally, is enhanced and sophisticates with artificial intelligence. The result is a new twist on the intensity of massification, this time applied on a global scale. What can be called digital hyper-massification.
The first volume – published for now in digital format and which will appear in print in a fortnight’s time – is subtitled: El tsunami due expropriation nostras vidas, el confinamiento digital a la sociedad de la distancia (The tsunami that expropriates our lives, from digital confinement to the distance society) and deals with the impact of digitalisation on identities and personal relationships.
Pérez Tornero defends the hypothesis that behind this confinement – which, moreover, has coincided with and exacerbated the sanitary confinement of COVID-19 – we are moving towards a society of distance, characterised by the constant increase in the separations between people and groups, which threatens to expropriate control of our lives.
The second volume, due to be published by the end of the year, addresses the effects of mass mediatisation on the global warming of the public sphere. It analyses the consequences of the new social ecosystem on public life – politics, journalism, education. What is revealed in this second part is the impossibility of sustaining the current democracy without a profound reform of the regulation of media and platforms. It also points out that a new authoritarian and media populism could spread like a drop of oil across the planet.
In short, an absolutely essential book to become aware of the media reality of our times that threatens to expropriate our lives and lead to an authoritarian media populism.
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