Virtual Reality - the Media's Role as an Intermediary in the Experience of Reality in the Post-Modern Mass Society

Dorota Inglik-Dziąg

Pełny tekst artykułu English version of the article

This article attempts to present the co-relations and interdependencies at the junction of two merging worlds - the social reality of modern, highly developed societies and the media reality, which plays an increasingly important role to man as an intermediary in his surrounding world. The article presents a hypothesis that the media have a growing influence on people in the process of communication, while the modern man in becoming increasingly lost in the global world with an endless amount of self-realization paths. The media's perception of reality is all the more often the only perception of the real world, otherwise inaccessible to man in a direct way. The modern media become this way an imperative contact intermediary between atomized, isolated individuals and social reality. The only stable constant of their decisions and actions.

KEYWORDS

mass communication, virtual reality, media reality, telematic media, mass society, post-modern society, information society, individualization of social life