A Collective Consciousness Model in a Post-Media Society

A Collective Consciousness Model in a Post-Media Society

Sherry Mayo
Copyright: © 2018 |Pages: 25
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5023-5.ch002
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Abstract

During the twentieth century, the modern media was born and viewed as an industrial factory-model machine. These powerful media such as film, radio, and television transmitted culture to the passive masses. These art forms were divorced of ritual and authenticity and were reproduced to reinforce their prowess. In the twenty-first century post-media condition, a process of convergence and evolution toward a social consciousness, facilitated by a many-to-many social network strategy, is underway. Web 2.0 technologies are a catalyst toward an emergence of a collectivist aesthetic consciousness. As the prophecy of a post-industrial society becomes fulfilled, a post-media society emerges whose quest is for knowledge dependent upon economy that barters information. This chapter identifies a conceptual model of this recent paradigmatic shift and to identify some of the possibilities that are emerging.
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The Consciousness Industry Reframed For A Post-Industrial Society

All these forms of media are constantly forming new connections both with each other and with older media like printing, radio, film, televisions, telephone, teletype, radar, and so on. They are clearly coming together to form a universal system (Enzensberger, 1974, p. 68).

It could be just Freud’s (1917) melancholia at play but Americans today still structure their institutions and corporations in keeping with the factory-model aesthetic. The habitual seating of students in gridded rows in schools, all facing one direction under the flag, and learning through passive transmission of information from teacher to student still perpetuates much of our educational practices. Most workers still mentally construct an image of themselves like Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory (I Love Lucy, Second Season, 1952-53), only willing to complete predefined tasks under micro-management. Our most elite intellectual centers remain conservatively tied to notions of corporate practices and adherence with market-forces that wag the dog. And some, only some, of our nations multi-national corporations actually understand the global kaleidoscopic, and create the age that we’re living in.

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