ABSTRACT
This article, a theoretical proposal, features an interdisciplinary discussion about media that puts communication at the center of the debate on contemporary democracies. From a well-established framework of studies that defines discourse as the encounter between language and institutions, here specified by the mediological perspective, we rely on the concepts of system and lifeworld to expose the conditioning tensions of the assigned and the assumed functions of what is usually referred by "media" in the current period, especially in its relation to politics. This implies fundamental notions for the human and social sciences as intersubjectivity and public opinion. We propose an argument on the imagery related to the media, on the practices that sustain it, and finally on the slipping movement that is established in the current conditions of the communicational "exchange", which are supposed to be the basis of human rights, witch are supposed to be, on its turn, a warranty of democracy, of its citizens. We focus here some aspects of the Brazilian context.
Keywords:
mídium; lifeworld; publicopinion