THE MEDIA AS MACHINERY OF PERSUASION

Abstract

The process of informing through the media, as well as direct face-to-face communication, is inevitably also a process of persuasion and imposing opinions. This act itself is natural, but experience tells us that rational logical argumentation does not bring an advantage in the exchange of opinions under a strong emotional charge. This phenomenon is not new, as even in ancient Greece the younger sophists failed Protagoras when they replaced the search for truth with the art of persuasion that will make weak claims stronger. Thus, oratory became eristic, the art of arguing with the aim of refuting someone else’s opinion. Skilled polemicists do not look for the truth, but for arguments that support their point of view. The development of technology and media forms have perfected this process and have euphemistically renamed the lie itself as the ‘post-truth’, which is useful and thereby justified. Kant’s observation about poetry as a creative imagination, and rhetoric as an insidious skill that turns people into ‘machinery of persuasion’ is used by the modern media for the creation of informative-entertaining content to achieve commercial and ideological goals. The all-powerful media machines abolish the objective perception of events and lead modern society into a decay that many civilizations have already experienced. Deus ex machina has become an omnipresent Deus ex media that solves nothing, but turns everything into a process of endless entertainment, a spectacle in which reason is enslaved by passions.