Homo videns

A classic about the constant transformation of man before the society of the image.

We are in the midst of a multimedia revolution. Homo sapiens, a product of written culture, is transforming into homo videns for whom the word has been dethroned by the image. And television plays a decisive role in all of this. The primacy of the visible over the intelligible leads to seeing without understanding, which has put an end to abstract thought, to clear and distinct ideas.

This is the fundamental premise from which the great Italian thinker Giovanni Sartori examines in this work—already a classic and, however, more relevant than ever today—video-politics and the political power of television; the conversion of the video-child into an adult deaf for life to the stimuli of reading and knowledge transmitted by written culture; the formation of public opinion, and the amount of knowledge that passes—and does not pass—through mass communication channels.

Faced with the unstoppable advance of the multimedia age, will a new way of thinking emerge, a post-thought in accordance with the new audiovisual culture?

Reviews:
«A polemical and exasperatingly intelligent essay, which vindicates the complexity of the word against video-simplifications, and knowledge against mere information.»
Fernando Savater

«A stimulating book that goes against the current. A goad to awaken the victims of video-anesthesia, a contribution to the salvation of culture, an invitation to seek reality in the tangle of over-information and image, which sometimes confuses and "also lies"... Sartori argues that television consumption is creating an impoverished, credulous, naive man marked by cultural atrophy.»
Justino Sinova, El Mundo

«A plea against the power of television, against the false belief that a picture is worth a thousand words, and a warning against the negative effects produced in an entire generation that has known television images before the printed word.»
Ángel Vivas, El Mundo

«This magnificent essay by Giovanni Sartori should be required reading in all schools and universities.»
Il Gazzettino

«A book that sweeps you away: when the attack is so violent but at the same time so sharp, so disconcerting but so superbly outrageous compared to technological clumsiness, it means that we will no longer be able to approach reality without radically changing the desolate relationship we have with it.»
Corriere della Sera

«Giovanni Sartori's new book is a fierce indictment of television and an alarm signal against the disasters that this powerful medium of communication is introducing into the nature and customs of our species. [...] The political scientist raises the alarm: multi-mediality and videocracy are a terrible own goal for humanity.»
L'Espresso