The society of mobs, the society of incommunication

Abstract

In the last 20 years, as the information society has developed, there has also been a tendency to forget the references that helped to understand the mass communication society. There has been a conceptual emptying that we must amend to problematize hate discourse, polarization and the fracture of the experience between the real and the virtual. To do this, we take as a starting point a compilation that connects various references: cultural industries, as consensus-producing entities; the media, as institutions of collective socialization; the digital virtualization process, as a break with the non-mediated experience; and mediatization, as an expression of (non) social participation in communication spaces. The analysis leads us to propose the idea of the society of mobs, the society of incommunication, a coexistence model typical of globalized societies, characterized by the extreme individualization and the virtualization of the communicative experience. As if enchanted by the light emanating from mobile phones, we would be disconnecting from the etymological meaning of sharing from the verb communicate. The ideal situation is thus being created for the spread of disinformation and ideological radicalization. If the 20th century was that of the masses, the 21st will be that of the mobs.