ABSTRACT
The celebrations of the Five Hundredth Anniversary commemorated a long and tiresome trajectory of associations with Western modernity. The political structures gradually allowed greater citizen participation, with alarm, with too frequent interruptions, and with procedures quite different from those imagined by classical liberalism. Videopolitics turns the exchange of information and debates, which were the nuclei of the modern public sphere, into spectacles where action is replaced by acting and simulacra. Electoral democratization and the growing recognition of individual rights are smothered by the exacerbation of inequality and the increasingly precarious situation of the majority. The results are the shredding of the social fabric, the destruction of collective identities, and the "apathy of enormous sectors of society, particularly the popular masses." The problems lie in the new modes of articulating modernization and "backwardness" in politics and culture, and in various cultural fields.
