(Tele)visiones del futuro. O de cómo los medios colonizaron el cuerpo

Abstract

Like it or not, we are witnessing a process of media socialization without precedent in the history of communication. Programming is now the filling necessary for the real proprietor of television, the advertiser, to achieve his objectives. As Debord pointed out, “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification.” It is no longer just the case of having a cerebral implant that turns us into cameras with legs, nor of being the involuntary protagonist in one's own television program, but rather of suffering the image as virus. The great global threat, that the cyberpunk fictions copy from our world, derives from the concentration of the mass media. The path towards Orwell’s dystopia necessarily passes through the existence of a Big Brother. Perhaps in the end the battle will reach beyond the terrain of content, from which point we must also be concerned with the technologies which permit its transmission.