Phenomenological Ethics of Contemporary Media Theories

Abstract

This article discusses fundamental contradictions regarding the social role of the new media. Avantgarde identifies the emergence of the new media with the possibilities of liberating the man and achieving true individuality, while dystopia qualifies it as the suffocation of individuality, as ballast that levels out and averages a man, as a threat to human freedom. The media technology is for the avant-garde the embodiment of the enriched self and expanded capacities of selfhood, while for dystopia, the media technology is directed against selfhood, since its effects start and end with the creation of alienation, with the distortion of selfhood directed against the fundamental attributes of humanity. On the contrary, for the avant-garde, the breach of media background awareness of the artistic expression has marked the definite parting with the age of alienated artistic practice. According to their most profound beliefs, staggering in the chains of figurative and narrative expressions, art has always served a different purpose, religion, pedagogy, politics, and ideology. Hence, the turn towards the demands and logic of the self-serving media marked the rise from the state of alienation to the state of true achievement, to the emancipation of artists and the art.