If we observe the space of the former Yugoslavia, with Albania included, a shared cultural trait emerges: the mass consumption of television as the dominant mode of experiencing reality. For decades, television was not merely a source of information, but a social institution, an apparatus for producing social and political truth.
By Lorik Idrizi
According to data from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) on audience measurement in the region, during the period 1990–2010 viewers in the Balkans spent on average between 3.5 and 5 hours per day in front of the television, among the highest levels in Europe. In some countries, over 90% of households relied on television as their primary source of information. In this sense, television functioned as a heterotopia, another space within social space, where reality was not only represented but also defined, particularly as an instrument within monist political systems.
Today, this collective trait has shifted almost entirely toward social networks. The Western Balkans ranks among the regions with the most intensive use of social media in Europe: roughly 70–80% of the population is active on social platforms, while average daily use often exceeds 2.5–3.5 hours, with young people reaching more than 5 hours. In North Macedonia and across the Western Balkans more broadly, social networks have become the arena where not only social interaction takes place, but also public debate, political propaganda, and identity and cultural disputes.
This shift is not merely technological but ontological, as it transforms the very way of being in the world. A parallel virtual life has emerged, a space resembling what Foucault would call a permanent heterotopia: a real place, yet outside everyday reality, where norms are suspended and a new social order is continuously redefined.
In this way, a simulated reality takes shape, in which politics is experienced not as the management of everyday life, but as a construction designed to be perceived as true. Unlike many Western European countries, where politics remains closely tied to institutions and concrete public policies, in the Balkans it is often reduced to parties, parties to leaders, and leaders to social media profiles. Political discourse has migrated from physical life and horizons to screens of perception, where the central competition is over which perception will dominate the others.
This has produced a dangerous phenomenon: the reduction of politics to communication rather than action. Politics, and the perceptions surrounding it, have been transformed into symbolic communication, because citizens encounter it primarily through politicians’ profiles and media narratives, rather than as a concrete reality that directly shapes their lives.
In this context, the virtual in the Balkans is not merely a product of technology, but of an unfinished transition. It is, in fact, the vacuum between a European future and post-socialist lethargy.