The midiatization of <i>zeitgeist</i>. Imaginaries on the screen

Abstract

Zeitgeist’s nineteenth-century concept is defined as “spirit of an era”. It emerged from romanticism and german Philosophy of History. It represents the spiritual and conceptual essence (or the geist) of a particular time, place and people (Germany of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and is also the product of a zeist (an era). We propose that the zeitgeist of our times predominantly manifests itself through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), social networks, the increasing digitalization of information and the material production itself, as well as everyday human practices mediatized by technologies. Social institutions themselves, politics and the physical economy tend to “materialize” on the screens of a virtual world governed by the processes of digitalization (the Information Society emerging through the processes of the cognitive economy). A reality physically based on screens, on material devices whose intrinsic value is not found in “objects” but in processes, images and data. An inmaterial world of signs and information conditioning all forms of reality. A reality governed by algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, interfaces, pixels, images, etc. The idealist “nineteenth-century spirit” of the zeitgeist of the 21st century has materialized in a universe of ubiquitous screens.