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We can understand that the culture of orality and obedience had a revival with the invention of the radio and of television. Let’s remember that the radio was the principal instrument of the Nazis in Germany of the pre-war period. Film and other techniques of spectacle were also important, although in lesser measure. Almost nobody had read that mediocre little book called Mein Campf (its original title was Against Lying, Stupidity and Cowardice) but everyone participated in the media explosion that was produced with the expansion of radio. During the entire 20th century, first film and later television were the omnipresent channels of US culture. Because of them, not only was an aesthetic modeled but, through this aesthetic, an ethics and an ideology, the capitalist ideology.

In great measure, we can consider the 20th century to be a regression to the culture of the cathedrals: orality and the use of the image as means for narrating history, the present and the future. News media, more than informative, have been and continue to be formative of opinion, true pulpits—in form and in content—that describe and interpret a reality that is difficult to question. The idea of the objective camera is almost uncontestable, much like in the Middle Ages when no one or very few opposed the true existence of demons and fantastical stories represented on the stones of the cathedrals.

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