Media „społecznościowe” jako media masowe – perspektywa filozoficzna

The purpose of this article is to discuss the thesis that a completely new and better type of political activism is associated with new digital media practices. I pose the following problem: are we pinning too many hopes for the democratisation of our social life on the so-called new media (especially various types of “social” networks)? When I speak of “democratisation”, I have in mind two potentialities inherent in the new digital technologies: dialogicity and transparency. These two qualities were absent from the discursive (here: one-way) messages of the traditional media (press) and the electronic media (radio, television). And it is precisely in technical possibilities and the ideas associated with them that the sources of positions claiming qualitative differences between the effects of traditional mass communication and the new “social” communication lie. I conduct these reflections from a philosophical perspective, drawing on the twentieth-century tradition of media and political philosophy (e.g. Vilém Flusser, the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Peter Sloterdijk, Mark Lilla, Régis Debray).