Abstract:

The development of mass communication technology, the emergence of satellite communications led to the emergence of Marshall McLuhan's theory of the "global village". The advent of the Internet has strengthened researchers' belief in the imminence of this "global village" and led to the development of the "network society" theory. From the perspective of the "network society", the Internet was seen primarily as a means of interpersonal communication and only then as one of the components of creating public perception. Election campaigns in recent years, starting with Barak Obama's, Brexit campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, have shown that the power of the Internet as a means of communication and creating public perception is greater than originally thought. The Internet tends to become an autonomous environment, able to build images, themes and characters by evading classic media that, most of the time, are forced to take over themes and characters that gain notoriety in the virtual environment. Classical media, by not adapting to postmodernity and what is called the "network society", in the sense that they have not transformed from mere transmitters of information and message into nodes of social networks, have offered an empty place. which virtual environments have occupied, making possible the construction of autonomous public perception, only through them. The Internet, as an autonomous environment for building public perception, has been consolidated both by the inadequacy of classical media and by the development of social networks as a pattern of sociability in the postmodern era.