Abstract

The article deals with the philosophical interpretation of the media concept. Philosophy of media is one of the most topical trends of modern philosophy. The purpose of the given article is to study the directions of conceptualization of media in philosophy of the second half of the XX century – the beginning of the XXI century. The most popular definition of the term media is «mass media», or «communication media». From the second half of the XX century this definition is regularly reproduced in various types of philosophical research, which deal with the critics of mass media/communication media. The founders of the Frankfurt School criticize media as a constituent of the culture industry. The philosophers of the school of cultural research carry out the analysis of the ideology of the retransmitted mass media. There is another interpretation of the media concept as «material factors of communication processes». The Canadian theorist of culture M. McLuhan considers media to be not only the means of the communication, but also a message. Therein the concept of «media» becomes the central tool for studying transformations of culture. The further development of the given direction in interpretation of media can be found in the research of W. Ong, F. Kittler, R. Debray. In a number of modern philosophical conceptions the media concept is defined even more broadly and is corresponded to the concept of language (D. Mersch, L. Wiesing, M. Vogel, V. Savchuk). The given directions of mediaphilosophy are the result of the linguisticturn, which designated language to be the central philosophical problem. The medialturn in modern philosophy is an extension of the linguisticturn and is one of the most important tendencies of hot cognition.