In Benjamin's own words, “the distinction between author and public … is beginning to disappear in the Soviet press”, where “the reader is always ready to become a writer”. 2 While most European newspapers relayed the opinions of a small elite, concerned with its own political and economic agenda, Soviet newspapers encouraged readers to send in their own texts and share their views with the public. 1According to Benjamin, this transformation was first promoted by the Soviet press, whose freedom contrasted with the elitism of the European editorial market. It began with the space set aside for “letters to the editor” in the daily press, and has now reached a point where there is hardly a European engaged in the work process who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other an account of a work experience, a complaint, a report, or something of the kind.
With the growth and extension of the press, which constantly made new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local journals available to readers, an increasing number of readers … turned into writers. This began to change toward the end of the past century. This new trend was highlighted by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, when discussing the growth of the European periodical press:įor centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of readers. The circulation of texts and images continued to grow, reaching ever-wider groups of people, but the gap between those who generate information and those who receive it began to decrease. More recently, however, a different model started taking shape. In contrast to live discourses or local publications, where the authors and the public were still in close contact with one another, high-circulation newspapers and magazines ushered in a more remote form of communication, aimed at an abstract and anonymous crowd. Yet this increase in scope was accompanied by an increase in the distance separating the source and the target of the communicative process. While traditional forms of communication were usually confined to local contexts, with concrete geographical boundaries, modern media practices gave rise to increasingly broad information chains. The emergence of modern mass media, following the invention of the printing press, allowed the information produced by a single person or institution to reach a much wider audience.
To clarify the nature of this phenomenon, I retrace the evolution of modern political communication, from live speeches to digital platforms and social networks, and discuss its implications for recent debates on political authority, participation and representation. In its most extreme form, interactivity leads to an implosion of the distinction between the sources and the targets of the information flow, which calls into question the very possibility of a meaningful communicative exchange. I claim that contemporary forms of communication, defined by a unique emphasis on interactivity, cannot be analysed simply in terms of the opposition between dominant and marginalised agents or discourses. In the present paper, I argue that this line of criticism, albeit important, is no longer sufficient. Looking at different media, these authors emphasised the dialectical tension between the plurality of the public sphere and different forms of control and manipulation.
Philosophy’s engagement with mass media has often been ambiguous: many critical theorists, from Benjamin to Bourdieu, recognised the emancipatory potential of modern communication technologies, but they also denounced the economic, political and ideological forces at work in the creation and dissemination of public opinion.
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