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Dagnostaw Demski
Initially there was no awareness that the authors of messages, photojournalists
and journalists, deployed “strategies of immediation” through which they attempt
to deal with their work environment experienced both in terms of praxeological
agentive subjectivity [and] ruled by systemic constraints imposed by media tech¬
nology. Slowly, a conviction was formed that what they do becomes part of the pro¬
cess of generating new cultural and political forms, as well as the kinds of changes
they bring about. It was accompanied by enthusiastic expectations about the effects
of new media technologies, such new media technologies are then the concretiza¬
tion of desires for more efficient, more “direct” forms of interaction as well as social
and political arrangements reformed accordingly (Eisenlohr 201 1a: 3).
What did the shift towards experiencing the reality through pictures produced
by the media in the years 1940-1970 consist in? During the period of the Cold
War and the lack of open contact with the outside world, awareness of ideologi¬
cal mediatization of the image was growing. The images of postwar reality—on
the one hand, the internal one; on the other hand, of the external world—me¬
diatized by the contemporary media (photographs) with a differing reach (daily
press, radio, described examples of albums offered to party secretaries, illustrated
weeklies)—formed one of the sources of experience. The fission of the pictures of
reality, more or less strongly sensed, lay at the root of a reflection of whether today
we are capable of experiencing the reality only through its derivative processing. It
was reinforced by the pictures of reality of the late 1950s and the 1960s mediatized
by television and newsreels but also by the images of the Vietnam War discussed
above. In Poland and in other eastern European countries, this impression was
formed as a result of the interaction of mostly ideological practices, written into the
use of available technologies and material means.
A direct bodily experience gives in to the medial images that, together with
the appearance of television, entered people’s lives in a more decisive manner. The
world begins to be formed by a processed image, and soon the majority of our ex¬
periences will come from mediatized images; our physical presence will be replaced
by the medium that exposes the body to the public view. The receiver has an im¬
pression of touching on the authentic events. This is a sign that we are approaching
a moment when the images produced by the media become a basic way of experi¬
encing the reality in which events become virtual, anonymous, and separated from
our sensory perception.
Changes in the notion of the real are realized through the transmission of given
messages and meanings but also through formal strategies of perception. Multime¬
dia provides the receivers with an opportunity to expose the essence of individual
media, when this theme appears in various media. Recognition of the mechanisms
by which media influence our ways of perceiving and exploring the world allows
us to free ourselves from the threats resulting from the deforming of reality, allows
us to recognize the configurations of the media that have a potential impact on
the ways in which reality is perceived and explored, and allows us to differentiate