The Future of Mass Media, Paradigm Change at the End of Information Order

This article examines the future of mass media at the point where the twentieth-century information order reaches structural exhaustion and a new paradigm of mass communication becomes unavoidable. Revisiting the critical legacy of UNESCO’s New World Information and Communication Order, Denis McQuail’s paradigm shift thesis, and the political economy critiques articulated in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent, the article argues that these models described a media system oriented toward stabilising power through manufactured consensus. Drawing on The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent, it develops the claim that contemporary digital media no longer primarily manufactures consent but systematically produces, manages, and monetises dissent through platform architectures, algorithmic amplification, and attention economies. The article situates this transformation within broader technological changes, including artificial intelligence, instant translation, permanent archiving, and global connectivity, which undermine secrecy and force power systems into unprecedented exposure to the past. Against this background, the article asks whether a new form of consent is possible by 2088—one century after Manufacturing Consent—under conditions of radical informational transparency. It concludes that the future of mass media is inseparable from the emergence of a new anthropological figure, the New Information Human, for whom knowledge replaces belief and verification replaces narrative loyalty, marking a shift from mass persuasion toward individual responsibility as the foundation of any future information order.