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48 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 technology. Slowly, a conviction was formed that what they do becomes part of the process 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 concretization 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 ideological 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—mediatized 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 experiences 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 impression 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 experiencing 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. Multimedia 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
