Contemporary Understanding of Education in the Rift between Ontological Relativity and the Transformed Media Culture

Abstract

The transformation of the developmental process from animal rationale, through homo communicans into the(un)aware homo symbolicum and the man receiving and distributing media information today, available throughmultimedia tools in his everyday life, encourages thought on the contemporary man, as well as the purpose, point andsense in contemporary education. The fact is that an individual’s life today cannot function deprived of virtualcommunication. It is possible to state that the world of mass and new media, changed the perception of reality in anessential way. Given the ontic nature of new media being based on technology i.e. the matrix of technical mediation ofthe real, fiction becomes reality and facts are (re)interpreted as media information. They not only aren’t the measure orthe guide in a theoretical context, they can also lead to an uncontrolled and unpredictable course of media information,due to their truthfulness not being questioned. That is how the global presence of media sets the forms of social life andsometimes relativizes the unquestionable nature of information, thus hiding the fundamental questions of the survivalof humane values. In such a context, ontology and ontological relativity provide a landmark in the review of thetruthfulness of facts, theories and scientific theoretical settings, especially when (re)defining the notion ofcontemporary education in the so-called “cyber” world. For those reasons precisely, taking into consideration thecausality of the relationship between contemporary media and the multimedia reality in which an individual is located,and in the context of ontological relativity, this paper attempts to search for the understanding of contemporaryeducation of man and of the true, without which true education as such is not possible.