№ 4 - 2014
Tretyakov V.T.
FUTURE VIRTUAL COMMUNISM AND HYPNOVISION: ON MASS TELEVISION AND MASS POLITICS

Modern television is television for the masses, or mass television. It is inscribed in the system of mass culture; it is the main means of its relay and one of its sources (it might be even said – creators). Mass society is consumed with telebelief (media-belief) – a large-scale, in fact global quasi-religious pagan cult. So, we deal with mass belief, and the manifestation of one of its most important properties is the phantom-forming function of TV. The mass virtualization of life is consequence of the realization of this function in the round-the-clock and everyday activity of TV – one of the most mass-scale (total) systems (and networks) of the world. Mass society is inevitably a mass consumption society, whose ideal and unrealized purpose may be presented as universal (mass-scale) hedonism. TV is the mass media which is inherent in the epoch of mass communication and hedonism, and these are not reducible to consumption of things, but suggest also cultural hedonism, i.e. society of mass entertainment meant as entertainment for the masses and in the format of mass entertainment. Mass culture, being able to continuously circulate in the information channels, and first of all in the TV channels, inevitably comes to the format of carnival – the most mass-scale of all known and of all possible forms of entertainment. Post-television form, or network form, of democracy has appeared and is developing. Naturally, it is shaping as a total one, but this time not as authoritarian, but as totalitarian one.