Out of the post. How Media Defined, Un-Defined and Re-Defined Modernity

This intervention proposes three mutually related arguments My first point is that both the definitions of the postmodern trend and the various movements pretending to overcome it are affected by the concurrent transformations of the media system to a greater extent than they usually admit. Second, in more detail, I argue that the spring of the postmodern condition is intimately linked to the last season of electric media, between the 1970s and 1990s of the twentieth century: during this period, the multiplication and ubiquity of media screens lead to the birth of “mediascapes”; these new media environments exasperate the contrast between media ex-perience and real experience, which has already arisen since the end of the 1950s. In turn, the overcoming of the postmodern trend is linked to a com-+plete affirmation of electronic and digital media from the 1990s onwards: the images they carry become part of more general data flow management processes that transcend the medial sphere and expand to various social practices (defence, surveillance, medicine, trade, etc.); the new images that derive from it are operational, that is, they imply not only being observed but instead effectively operating within and on different environments. Finally, my third argument is that the transition from electric media to electronic-digital media is linked to the shift from postmodern to post-post-modern trends because of transformations that take place in the epistemic status of images.