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ations. Therefore even the everyday news and information we read
consist basically of advertisement.27
“Does democracy deserve to survive?” This is the title of one of
the chapters in Lasch’s book. What has already been said about
information refers exactly to this issue, that is democracy and its
function.
When Pasolini died the internet did not exist and when Lasch
died it had not yet developed all those technical tools and devices
(YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Dailymotion, PureVolume and so
on, each with a related blog) which today make an enormous
amount of people potentially able to communicate with each other
in real time about any subject.
A vast body of literature exists on the social and psychological
impacts that the invasion of the internet and its communication
devices can produce (or have already produced) in people’s daily
life. On the internet the audience seems to determine the form and
the contents of the medium; the consumer is apparently able to
organize and control and – most importantly – to generate his
product. But in Against the Machine Lee Siegel explains how the
concept of total democracy which seems to pertain to the internet
is deeply incorrect and distorted. When the Los Angeles Times and
other papers abolished their book review section numerous literary
blogs performed a sort of “dance of triumph”28 which, according to
Siegel, was “an example of [their] antidemocratic egalitarianism”29.
Paradoxically and ironically, “in their attempts at being iconoclas-
tic and attacking big media […], the bloggers are playing into the
hands of political and financial forces that want nothing more than
to see the critical, scrutinizing media disappear.”30
This can sound rather incongruent with the aforementioned dis-
tortion of everyday news and information. But the incongruity here
stands precisely at the core of today’s democracy and constitutes its
STEFANO ROSATTI
263
27 See Scott M. Cutlip, Allen H. Center and Glen M. Broom, Effective Public Relations, Upper
Saddle River (New Jersey): Prentice-Hall Inc, 2000 [first edition, 1952], pp. 305–313.
28 Lee Siegel, Against the Machine. Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, New York: Spiegel
& Grau, 2008, p. 140.
29 Ibid, p. 141.
30 Ibid, p. 141.
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