Tadeusz Szuba

The article analyses the hypothetical Fourth Estate (the 4th Power) on the platform of modern, global electronic media. The entry assumption is that the engine of 4th Power is Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand (ASIH), but functioning not on the socio-economic platform, but on the platform of modern, global electronic media. This implied significant research phenomena, because two large scale processes have been spotted on this platform, which fulfil theoretical model of Invisible Hand as proposed by American philosopher Robert Nozick. The rank of success is confirmed by the fact, that nobody yet on socio-economic platform managed to point to real life symptoms of the Invisible Hand self-regulative activity. Platform of global electronic media has a much more IT nature, comparing to the economic/social platform. For this, applying the way of thinking of Nobel-awarded economist Friedrich Hayek, that the mechanism of the Invisible Hand is IT in nature, it has been assumed that it is an unconscious, chaotic, discontinuous, distributed, multi-threaded computational process, not on the platform of digital computers, but on the platform of minds of agents operating in modern media. This allowed us to propose description methodology based on GIS (Geographic Information Systems). The conclusion of the article is that the Fourth Estate inherits and manifests in very well visible way the Invisible Hand self-steering functions, on the media platform and even more. This sheds a whole new light on the problem of media management on a global scale, because state or corporate factors have to reckon with the fact that there is yet another “ruler” of great power. In addition, due to the global nature, in a situation where the Legislative, Judicial and Legislative Powers are distributed and limited to the area of countries or meta-nation structures like European Union, the Fourth Estate is on the best way to take over partial or total control over global media, as well as over local Legislative, Judicial and Executive authorities. This is to some extent confirmation of Robert Nozick hypothesis about “ultra-minimal state”.