Hybrid News for Hybrid Times

Abstract

Hybrid genres include infotainment, infomercial, arguetainment, communication stampede, spin, and media spectacle. In altered social circumstances, the usual elements of existence as a society, citizen, and public are transformed into the market, consumerist and commercial. Conventional information education becomes ad hoc commercial education. Instead of genuine media content that seeks a media audience that resonates with it, there is advertising (entertainment) through private media intended for consumers. In a construed reality, media corporation owners are not interested in the citizen, but in profit. The consequences include social spectacularization, the illusion of de-ideologization, celebrity culture, and the fact that we are generally becoming shallow. The pandemic has further intensified these trends, which in the horizons of media philosophy may be primarily considered as a Neronian intensification of fear on a global scale.