Throughout the first half of the course, theoretical features provided by some classic authors will be analyzed. Their study will be framed into the epistemological pattern provided by Silverstone’s sociology of media, with particular reference to the power of media in their weakening or empowerment of the perception of safety. His sociology of media will be probed through the analysis of sociology of consumption in line with the dialectic between simulacrum and reality in the age of codified objects.
In this course, the process of individualization marking the digital modernity which led to the lack of attractiveness of traditional symbolic universes will be covered. Hence follow the loss of the traditional certainties and the dimension of reintegration, conceived as the construction of a new kind of social bond. Such a process of liberation leads to a loss of values and reintegration. Hence follows the deprivation of “objects” from the “phenomenon”, which can be considered as the appearance. According to Baudrillard things disappear as they are replaced with their simulations. This is the “perfect crime” carried out by television and, more generally, by mainstream media: unlike Orwell’s 1984, the Big Brother is the image, whereas everything else is immaterial, separated, exchangeable. If everything is information, nothing can really inform. Thus the system of objects drawn by media becomes the epistemological frame of media actors, which has to go through the emotional psychological fluctuations produced by media narrations. Hence follows the re-semantization of the concept of safety and unsafety, as they are closely linked to the informative amplification and redrafting. Baudrillard refers the process of representation of reality to the power of media to connecting daily experience to the consumption of shared objects, since they are expressed by the need of certainties fed by the mass society. Thus, the “perfect crime” of television implies the replacement of reality with alternative symbolic simulacra, which can swamp the illusion of safety and the removal of social risk.