ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the media simultaneously ‘dehistoricize’ and ‘defamilize’ production and consumption for the masses, while they re-float the professional and political legitimation of these processes. Modern technology is increasingly assimilated to the reciprocal adaptations of man, nature, and society which occur in a horizontal field of information or communication. The media employ a variety of audio-visual technologies, ranging from satellite television to newspapers, magazines, scientific journals, catalogues and handbills, each of which can play a specific role in raising or depressing the level of public awareness. Rather, the media relay the choices already made in the political economy for pseudo–ratification by the viewer-consumer-voter. Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, the media do have a message and it is the message that makes the media necessary as instruments of global domination. The specular tasks of the media are necessary functions in the legitimation of capitalist democracy.
