Ortega y Gasset’s message of regressive progress toward internet-based individualism

Abstract

In his works Meditación de la técnica (Meditations on Technique) and La rebelión de las masas (Revolt of the Masses), Ortega y Gasset predicted that the communication media would produce global interdependence, nowadays referred to as “globalisation”. Following the Orteguian criticism of idealism, the text sees the media as a prosthesis added to the human sensorium which endlessly broadens the field of observation limited to the senses. Widespread access to European scientific knowledge by other cultures, as well as the propagation of technical aids resulting from interaction with the internet – a global sphere of face-to-face relationships regardless of distance – is displacing the cultural supremacy of the West, as the Eastern world appropriates scientific and technical knowledge, a situation predicted a century ago by Ortega y Gasset when he warned that Europe would no longer rule the world.