ABSTRACT
Media are institutions with particular power over the means for representing shared reality, reality that becomes recognised as “ours”, in part, through what media do. Media institutions’ relations to social knowledge have been entangled from the start with the submerged categories, norms and exclusions through which some notion of national life or culture gets constituted. Large-scale media content producers, and cultural industries linked to them such as advertising, are already closely involved in social media. An advertiser who is concerned with reaching not big audiences gathering simultaneously at a particular place but individuals tracked serially as they cross the media landscape, including on social media. As F. Von Schiller saw, a polity based on an impoverished model of the human subject cannot expect much loyalty from, or legitimacy with, those it governs. The warning holds, whether it is governments or dense networks of corporations that are promoting the “construct of the intellect” in question.
