The media dimension of risk has undergone relevant shifts in recent years, in conjunction with the evolution of journalism, along with the diffusion of mainstream media and the rise of internet. This is what recent studies have unearthed, thanks to some successful theoretical insights in the field of communication studies, as in the case of Silverstone’s “mediapolis”. Technology, entertainment, journalism have turned “media logic” into a shared social culture. The narration of (criminal) risks marks daily life, within the political and institutional spheres at large.
Zygmunt Bauman emphasizes this aspect in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), in line with research aimed at demonstrating the institutionalized (and not ephemeral) dimension of the extermination of the Jews. The author strives to shed light on certain inaccuracies afflicting collective memory and scientific literature, with the purpose of highlighting the deeper meaning of the Holocaust, not infrequently interpreted as a mere episode in the millenary history of antisemitism or as a bloody hiccup, as a vile but momentary deviation from the highway of civilization.
Side by side with these interpretations, Bauman sets a ruthless analysis of daily life in the extermination camps. The latter are not considered as a kind of social disease but as a phenomenon connected to social normality. In Bauman’s perspective, the holocaust is inextricably interlaced with the logic of modernity developed in Western countries. Rationalization and bureaucratization are typical of Western civilization, inasmuch as they were the prelude to the Nazi genocide which was the result of the convergence of social upheaval and modernization, along with the painful uncertainty and powerful instruments of social engineering connected to modernity itself. The heritage of the Holocaust has to be framed within its radicality, especially in a world once again encumbered by fast transformations and new problems of cohabitation between cultures and ethnic groups.