Media and the New Visibility. Giornata di studi in onore di John B. Thompson

The development of communication media has created a new form of visibility in the modern world, severing the visibility of individuals, actions and events from the sharing of a common locale. The rise of this new form of mediated visibility has transformed the relations between visibility and power and created new forms of struggle and contestation in the modern world. Skilful politicians exploit this to their advantage: with the help of their PR consultants and communications advisors, they seek to create and sustain a basis of support by managing their visibility in the mediated arena of modern politics. But mediated visibility is a double-edged sword. It also creates new risks for political leaders, who find themselves exposed to new kinds of dangers. Hence the new visibility becomes the source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility: however much political leaders try to manage their visibility, they cannot completely control it. Mediated visibility can slip out of their grasp and can, on occasion, work against them, as attested to by the multiple forms of trouble which afflict political leaders in the age of mediated visibility – gaffes, leaks and, above all, scandals. Today we live in an age of high media visibility, which means that political life now unfolds in an information environment where the capacity to reveal and conceal, to make things visible and prevent others from doing so, are much more difficult to control, creating a permanently unstable arena in which leaks, revelations and disclosures are always capable of disrupting the most well-laid plans.