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Author: Herlander Elias


Text Revision and Translation: Herlander Elias & Ondina Pires

Cover Design: Herlander Elias

PART I - In Change

There are several ways of dividing our historical line; however the development of digital media reveals a demarcation of what lies behind. We can thus explain that there is a pre-media era, one of media and one of post-media. The latter will not necessarily have to do with the end of the media, but instead with a period when it is impossible for us to return to the pre-media period. In this way, it is impossible to return to the moment without mediation, without mass media (Press, Radio and TV) or digital media (smartphones, cloud, web, tablets, blogs, social media, etc).

The pre-media era was one in which individuals lived integrated into a natural ecosystem. There were "means", but there was no media, for instance: there were engravings on the cave walls, people communicated through the ornamentation of their bodies, meaning, there was an aesthetic sensibility towards the body and face, and the trophies were displayed to communicate a social status. Out of the caves, that is, out of the prisons of ancestral images, the human beings had to deal with the cities and nothing else was the same as before. Moreover, cities symbolize gigantic machines of human beings and machines of machines — cities are the symbol of the second era. If in the pre-media era there is no sedentary life, in the middle one also called second era, we are confronted with the phenomenon of sedentary life through the arising of cities, commerce and new migratory flows. Thus, big urban centers turned into mega-machines for people who work with machines and in places where money and medium-scale trade abound, while suburban areas are useful as logistics support for the center of the polis. But where were the media? The media consisted of scrolls, documents in the libraries, ceramic engravings or stone tablets with inscriptions and reliefs. In the streets and forums the heralds used to announce the news aloud in front of a crowd eager for them. In this remote epoch, the media consisted of oral accounts, written inscriptions on soft supports and stone. Any material with plasticity able to be handled, baked, or painted, was used. For example, the army banner system was a good and useful support (or "medium") from the point of view of warfare communication.

Yet, how did we reach a time when the city became a media machine, "offering" publicity posters, newspaper distribution, radio and TV programs broadcasting celebrities’ life, books on sale, and the "pass the word around” advertisement strategy, to the new bourgeoisie? The answer is simple: it was done through capitalism and information. In today's city, which is typical of the post-media phase, there has already been a merger between the sphere of information and that of capital. Even if in the previous era that occupies the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, information and capital correlate, they are not merged. There was a very close relationship between the sphere of investment and all that was promoted in the mass media leading to increase their notoriety.

Afterall, it was the emergence of the computer that brought about the merger of the city, as a "machine of machines", with its factories and automobiles, along with information and capital. The computer dethroned the city as a machine of machines and became a transverse construct. Thus, we can infer that there is a phase in which the city is the machine per se, and this is the middle phase, the Gutenberg era; later, we have the post-media era, where the computer is the new evolution icon "contaminating" all areas of society with its hardware and software. Still, what is curious is that in the post-media era is that the media reify, they do not disappear. This is a new media golden era. In addition, individuals also assume behaviors typical of the pre-media phase; the only difference is that they are information, knowledge and quantitative data hunters.

In view of the computer evolution, we are face to face with some situations: firstly, information is virtual and therefore not concrete at all, now it circulates among various means. The important thing is not the access point but the access itself. Information is physically registered, but leaves so much trace in the network that a computer is no longer the exclusive terminal of access to data. Data move, circulate, are copied and transferred. Secondly, it becomes increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to know who is the author of such information because in the post-media era the information has been emancipated from its creator. Nowadays, the information almost self-generates itself. The landscape of information that is consolidated through mass media and digital media has become a building without an owner, a construct of truth made of lies and lies made of truth. Information overload along with disinformation makes it extremely difficult for the modern individual to distinguish useful information from useless one. Computerization was not used to simplify only, it transformed a series of processes and operations into a rather complex task.

Nowadays everything is a construct, artifices of technique, false data, half truths, manipulated statistics and sterile quantifications in non-nexus studies. Currently, we live in an era where the magical lies in what a technical "myosotis" can provide. However, there is one outstanding issue — all that was possible to be transferred to media has already been. So, we just have to be amazed at the way the post-media stage present us, new technologies that are increasingly intelligent and cooperative with our projects. At this point in time, machines work for us, they help us finding real GPS sites and they find information on search engines too. The news aggregators in app mode for smartphone bring us just what is "interesting" to us. And to go around the technical filter, many advertisements are no longer content interruptions, such as on Radio and TV — they became content as we can notice on TV series and video clips, games and movies.

The third stage of the media expresses their own production of contents alone. With digital media it is possible to automate certain processes in order to consolidate an information landscape that is supposed to be connected to the first reality. Taking into account that the post-media era and the pre-media one have in common the "hunting" and "gathering" elements, we can infer here that today we are no longer the ones who use the media to hunt information. Instead, individuals are now the hunted ones by the media. In the post-media phase, the scheme has been reversed: the media environment is the protagonist, and the individual is the scenario. Let me try to make it clear: firstly this implies that the media environment that surrounds us is a construct-character, an information machine that chooses us to inform and sell products. Secondly, individuals are the scenario, because they have taken on a background role, not one of information hunters, but rather being hunted down by the very information that comes to them.

Throughout the three eras we have always had the individual as protagonist. In the pre-media era he hunts, forms communities and survives in groups of hunters. In the media era, he seeks knowledge and information and survives working for governmental or private corporate-type institutions. But in the post-media era there is a reversal of this process: the individual can no longer integrate the machine and is the machine that integrates him, transforming him into media audience. The same means we used to inform are now the ones that prevent us to evolve. We have been "attached" to a system that informs us that it has to inform us for "our own good", for its functional pleasure, and because we are now inside the production machine. This means that we think we are controlling the flow of information, but such action does not occur — it is precisely the opposite. A good example of what has been said is "YouTubers" since they are influential individuals on YouTube; yet they only make sense because they advertise branded things like products and services, and would never exist if there were no social network / directory of information such as YouTube, or even a group like Alphabet, which owns the largest search engine in the world: Google. And here lies the scary question: with the centralization of information in just a few digital media how can one believe in the motto that "information wants to be free?" However, everything points to the creation of information constructs more focused on tuning their information with us, pretending it is us who seek, find and have the freedom to choose what informs us.

The third post-media era is a moment in our history where the media became autonomous in relationship to individuals; digital media think for us, cooperate with us, inform, select, support and guide. Hunting has been the element that has always distinguished us, but now it is on the media side. The media catches our attention, offering us tour packages, products and attractive services. We are forced to plunge into a landscape of information in which we have no control. Lastly, we have only control in itself performing. And at this point, control is an innovative one because it no longer intends to controlling or pretending to do it. This new control seems a choice, it seems our freedom of choice in what concerns digital media freedom being it communicating to us and what is automated to be communicated. Previously there were audiences and public for the mass media. Now we have new media that are the protagonists of the big corporate brands, and on the weaker side, we have individuals, heads down, always with their eyes held on their digital media screens, just like Japanese girls, the cybiko, victims of the new media predatory environment that haunts us even in mobile media, such as tablets and smartphones and wearables.

2.Cybikos

Japanese girls walking in the streets staring at smartphones are called cybikos; they are the "cyber-girls" of the mobile media and digital media age. Every day, they socialize, go shopping, and attend entertainment events in terms of contents, all through the smartphone. These young women symbolize an archetype of the youth of the current times as the ones who never turn off smartphones. As it is of public knowledge these pocket computers need, like any digital media, to be restarted from time to time. If the devices are not turned off, this means that they have become the favorite device — the remote control for everything that happens on a daily basis: chatting, sending messages, calling, accessing the Net or simply taking photos or using the numberless apps.

In general, young people today are like this. They are always "on", they do not hang up. They perform several tasks through these new mobile media and are more alert to what happens on these generous screen devices than to what actually happens off-screen. The smartphone screen has become the first screen, or the first reality. If something happens, then it has to appear on this screen. If it does not appear on this screen it is because it did not happen. Being always connected to the smartphone has a price — you start seeing the world as a set of applications and in case you need to solve any situation in the real world, you have to search a specific app to solve that particular problem. That is how young people think, with the pockets of their clothes altered to accommodate the generous-screen smartphones. It is also true that smartphones have become a seductive product where everything counts, from the user experience (UX) to the design of the elements that appear on the screens. The smartphone is basically a pocket computer with a big screen. This means that the device that dominates our lives and replaced the GPS, the camera, the notepad, the game console and the computer is still a computer, but small. This pocket computer is a revolutionary device. We do not buy this device just because we need it, but because we want to buy it. It is not a product of a consumerist society, but a product of a society of desire.

The smartphone brought a revolution to our everyday lives. Possessing a computer in your pocket is one thing, but having an online computer at your fingertips nurtured free access to the network. Now, it is possible to have Net twenty-four hours over twenty-four hours — the equipment that accompanies us from waking up to bedtime is the smartphone and it's called smartphone because it is a smart device. If we add to this functional side social network, we have a super-seductive cocktail. We can start friendships by SMS, we can call people and take photos or activate meetings by videoconference, make accounts, open files, turn off lights, going shopping and order something to be sent to our real address. The smartphone brand and the type of ecosystem brand to which it belongs also say something about us. Nowadays, the youth that is always clinging to smartphones belong to brand tribes. Within smartphones, apps are also brands and social networks are corporate identities too. The commercial world merged with the world of telecommunications. The result of this is is that when we talk to someone we do not know if we are being recorded. Everything goes to the Net, and today, an individual becomes a legion. When we talk to someone we are talking to the world, with all sorts of consequences that this entails.

Smartphones are also a sexy, ergonomic, autonomous product. They replace the Radio and TV, computer and typewriter, pager and landline, fax and photocopying machine. There are about 2 trillion transistors in most cases inside a smartphone. It was not possible to take a computer to each child’s "home" in Africa, as it was the case in the 1990s. However, curiously, a low-cost smartphone manufactured in China or India was put in the hands of each person. The four major groups of smartphones are Google, Apple, Huawei and Samsung brands. Besides this, social networks can be augmented taking advantage of the smartphones functionalities by adding smart features to their users’ lives, whether they are cybikos or mobile media boys.

A noticeable thing is that the rise of smartphones, as a device that allows us to be always connected, led to the fall of the sale of notebook and desktop computers. Since everything can now be registered in the cloud, owning devices with their own empty space has become a luxury. The most practical is to use the Net and record everything in the cloud because it stores almost everything referring to the average user of digital media. Your smartphone works as a remote control for anyone accessing to contents from long distance. However, this feature remains: the distance. It is the distance that keeps the time of telecommunications. Some psychiatrists and psychologists even argue that the smartphone has reinforced loneliness that it has created an infinite loneliness and that the way to break it is by making a phone call. On the other hand, if the user keeps the Net active on the smartphone, he can access to social networks, as an escape from loneliness and as a virtual place to meet new friends.