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The pluralist ecology LUCIA SANTAELLA
O
ne of the most relevant factors in understanding the complexity of contemporary cultural production is to be found in the melting-pot of mixtures and hybridizations that characterize it. Today, the various cultural eras - the oral and vernacular, the written and the printed, mass culture, media culture, cyberculture - all coexist, side-by-side and synchronized, in configuring a hyper-complex and hybrid cultural mix. It is the current convergence of mediums in the cyber world, in the coexistence of media culture with mass culture, mixed in with the cultures that preceded them – the oral, written and printed, all still very much alive and well -, that has been responsible for the level of exacerbation that the densely matted network of the production and circulation of symbolic patrimony has reached in our day. However, this cultural inflation and overproduction started to make itself felt as far back as the 60s, at the height of pop culture, and intensified in the 80s, with the emergence of media culture and the proliferation of debates on the post-modern, post-modernism and post-modernity. These debates signalled a growth in cultural complexity and in the increasingly greater prominence culture was attaining in social life.
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