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Cultural Production of the Real Through Picturing Difference in the Polish Media: 1940s—1960s
the Vietnam War). It is reflected in the examples of the new strategies of perceiving
of phenomena.
Dorota Sajewska refers to this when she writes about a representation from
1913: “transfer of the centre of gravity from the artifact to the act of reception,
from the representation to a social performance” (2012: 24). According to her it is
better not to speak about the media but about mediality—that is, certain structures
through which media create, transmit, and communicate facts (Ibid.: 54).
In this sense, the nature of mediality is perceived as a way of existing, per¬
ceiving, and exploring the world—as a type of construction that perpetuates or
undermines the type of reality in which we live. This assumes the existence of vari¬
ous levels of reality and, what is more, a basic distinction between ideological and
practical reality.
We are observing the beginnings of an era of medial reality’s acceleration in the
area of the world’s perception and understanding. The new reality not only suggests
the subjects but also the form—a next model steered and controlled by the con¬
temporary norm. What does not fit is eliminated, simplified messages are created
out of complex events, and content takes place.
According to Jonathan Sterne (2003),”* the key to an appropriate reception is
the role of a mediator. The image and the message create an impression of authen¬
ticity if on the one hand, in the centre there is a direct witness of these events who
in one way or another relates what happened or, on the other hand, a vanishing
mediator who is a convincing attempt to draw the spectator into the image of the
reality.
The 1960s and the accounts of the Vietnam War changed the view on the
media and finally confirmed the gap between the picture and the reality. The ques¬
tion arises as to how to maintain the to-date sense of professionalism and practical
agency in the face of numerous variables and randomness. This is not yet a question
in the 1960s, but it begins to fit in the 1970s and the 1980s. Institutional influ¬
ences on the medial effect and product were already understood before that time.
Immediacy does not exist prior to but, rather, is a product of mediation. Imme¬
diacy was related to a growing role of the receiver as an active agent after the year
1970 in Western countries.
‘The diversity of war accounts gradually confirmed the receivers’ conviction that
media became a tool and served a specific strategy. The appearance of new media
causes a crisis and destabilization of the to-date forms of representation and media¬
tion. The birth of television gave rise to a conviction about participation, immedia¬
cy, a faith in what was being seen. Television and belief in it was an answer to static
images, verbal press accounts, unsatisfactory forms of mediatization. Such a strategy
brings about an impression of the “real presence” of an emerging global community.
23 A vanishing mediator, a medium that erases its own traces and interferences (Sterne 2003 quoted in
Eisenlohr 201 1b: 47).
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