The media, with the Internet at the forefront, has been expanding its area of influence and drastically homogenising the narratives through which we give meaning to the world, even beyond the media context. This phenomenon of contagion extends to diverse realms, from the private and the intimate to the political, the cultural and the artistic, in the form of a quasi-discursive monopoly. This is one of the main conclusions of a research project carried out by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) that uses communication theory to analyse the scope and effects of the mainstream discourse on and about the Internet, paying special attention to the phenomenon of social networks.
“The ‘habitats’ constructed on the basis of digital forms of media interaction are characterised by the generation of simulations of discursive transparency, by the denial of narrative forms as shapers of reality and by the promotion of a supposed factuality beyond the narrative,” says Pilar Carrera, professor in the Department of Communication at UC3M and author of “La comunicación en el diván. Efectos políticos del imaginario digital” (Communication on the couch. Political effects of the digital imaginary) (Cátedra, 2025). “From ‘Big Brother’ to ‘Big Data’, this essay could be described as an analysis of the media unconscious and its political effects in a society increasingly structured around the logic of ‘entertainment’”, she adds.
Combining elements of psychoanalysis, philosophy and critical media theory to explore the impact of the digital ecosystem on subjectivity and the construction of power, Carrera argues that the Internet, in its role as a mass media, produces an environment where the symbolic structures generated by the coexistence of discourses and systems of mediation in concurrence (necessary conditions for democracy) are eroded, giving way to new forms of control camouflaged as transparency and empowerment.
Given the obvious recycling between the logic of capital, power and the mass media, the implications of this research are clear. Carrera warns against confusing technology with media logic, something which is very common and distorting. What is at issue here is not technology, nor is it a question of rehashing some nostalgic and regressive “Luddite” argument. The “tabula rasa fallacy and the myths of disintermediation have proven quite useful in diverting attention from the power structures that administer and orchestrate the alleged ‘noise’ of the Internet, a medium in which, in reality, as in any mass media, everything is planned and controlled.”
She also argues that the shift towards a totally mediatised privacy completely disconnected from the polis, as has been happening over the last decades and definitively consolidated during the COVID-19 pandemic, represents a regression, in terms of the imaginary, to pre-democratic regimes.
To carry out this analysis, the author uses an interdisciplinary methodology that combines the study of media cases with a philosophical approach. Through the examination of phenomena such as hyperconnectivity, ‘clickbait’ culture and the algorithmic manipulation of public discourse, she highlights how the digital environment has generated an imperialist and deterministic narrative capable of obliterating the plurality of the world and the possibility of change: “It is an act of fraudulent misrepresentation to identify the architecture of the Internet with the architecture of society as a whole and, even more so, with reality”.
The research also looks at aspects related to the dominant media discourse on AI, in which the already weakened notion of responsibility is intentionally blurred even further (attributed first to the ‘users’ and now to some ‘out-of-control’ algorithm and not to the owners of the different platforms): “The mainstream discourse on AI is, at the same time, miraculous, apocalyptic, omnipotent, occultist..., a true testamentary-astrological mix and match. We have entered the Tarot phase of the medium.” All this, it is pointed out, responds to reasons of a strictly prosaic nature, to do with economics and power. “The digital narrative is only a reflection of itself, of its own logical structure, camouflaged under an apparent Babel-like polyphony of global users,” concludes Carrera.