CC BY
16
Section 7. Philosophy
Vasylieva Lyudmila Anatolievna, PhD, docent,
Department of Political Science and Sociology, The National Aerospace University KhAI,
Kharkiv, Ukraine E-mail: adululu@gmail.com
Comprehension of the phenomenon of public communications
Abstract: The article is an attempt to understand the phenomenon of public communications as a special integrator of cross-cultural space, able to reveal personal and cultural discourses. Keywords: publicity, brand, advertising, culture, cultural code.
phenomenon of publicity as one of the leading cross-cultural phenomena.
The research of the publicity is focused on different forms of this phenomenon — from the public spaces in the political sphere to the determination of the socio-cultural limits of this phenomenon. Particularly noteworthy are the publicity researches made by such scientists as H. Arendt, J. Habermas, M. Harselon, A. Giddens, J. Van Dyke, R. Deutsch, M. Davis, S. Zukin, M. Castells, N. Luhmann.
The public sector, being a conceptually new phenomenon for the social and communicative space of the information society, and actively claiming to be its dialogical basis, is the beginning of the backbone of the modern philosophical thought. The leading forms of public communications involved in the public area (e. g., the political prestige, branding, and the mass media representation), are the important means of implementation of social, political, and personal discourses, able to form the current global environment.
For the first time, the concept "public space" was identified with Hannah Arendt, who defined it as a "second life" of a person, which came out from the private everyday life sphere. According to Arendt, the pattern and the forefather of the public sphere is a Greek polis, where free citizens gathered for the collective decision-making [1].
The phenomenon of public communications represents a challenge and problem for the socio-philosophical knowledge, because of the currently increasing gap between the rapid growth of the practical manifestations ofpublicity in various areas of public life and its narrow theoretical framework of comprehension and definition of science.
Public communications have long ceased to be merely a new social phenomenon, an isolated activity, manifested in all spheres of social life. Currently, public communications ambitiously claim to be a special integrator of the globalization space, since in the present crisis conditions the importance is given to the intercultural public communication, which is able to create a single symbolic matrix and the form of group identification. Despite the diversity of cultures, the world stands as a single whole. Its dialectical relationships provide an evolutional movement of the mankind. It is a constant process of mutual enrichment of nations through the mutual impact and penetration of cultures, which form a unique "mosaic" of modern civilization. And it is the public intercultural dialogue that should be the essential characteristic of the human life, the principle of coexistence and interaction of people, the means of achieving mutual understanding.
The objective of this article is the social and philosophical understanding and definition of the
Comprehension of the phenomenon of public communications
Another direction that interprets the concept of public communications was presented by J. Habermas. To him we are obliged for the introduction of the term "publicity" into the scientific and practical circulation, and for the use of this term to mean "highly educated bourgeois society" (later "society as a whole") able to act as a critical counterweight to all social and political institutions of the state [6, 56]. Although, some authors in accord with many theories believe that the term "publicity" wasn't introduced by J. Habermas. For example, a scientist S. S. Bodrunova, who has comprehensively investigated the origin of the term "publicity", proves that "the concept of the public sphere came into the Anglo-Saxon science from the German science back in 1964: the term «public sphere» has been found in the «Fischer Lexikon» dictionary (the mass communication and journalism issue, among the authors are E. Noelle-Neumann and Mr. William Schultz)" [2, 123]. According to her, the debate on the public sphere in English and German literature started much later after the J. Habermas encyclopedic article about the concept of publicity, which he defines as "the area of social life that forms public opinion" [7]. In her study, the author pays much attention to the structural and functional approach to the determination of publicity based on the political discourse and on the understanding of publicity as deliberative democracy [2].
Modern public communication in accordance with the definition of the public communicative system should be viewed as a structured and ordered in a certain way set of communicators, recipients, notional messages, communication channels and services, which have material and technical resources and professional staff. If the culture is a set of material, immaterial, and artificial social senses, the public communication is a part of the figurative culture, able to ensure the movement of cultural contents in the social space and time.
The discussions on the concept ofpublicity have been held for several centuries, and several attempts have been made to define it — at first from the point of view of the ratio of public/private in social life, and then as the political and communicative phenomenon. In the general sense, the public sector can
be described as a reality, which combines numerous mini-publics, which can be represented in occasional discussions.
Here is our own definition of the public sphere phenomenon. In our opinion, "public sphere is an artificially created socio-communicative reality, focused on the successful personal presentation and social representation of individual and personal contents in the discursive field, by virtue of the techniques and technologies prevailing in certain types of social development".
Branding as one of the techniques of the public sphere can be considered as the convenient public intercultural platform, which can be used for a certain socio-cultural discussion, which is able to affect the cultural component of a certain cultural space, at the same time the boundaries between personal and public are rather blurred, allowing creating the illusion of trustful and open communication. Modern brands, as the embodiment of a hidden sense, claim to be the cultural codes of the cross-cultural space, the unique technological tools for the incarnation of the human "I". It is known that cultural code, unlike the signs or symbols, is never a material object (material carrier of data), "code is not a physical reality" [4, 56]. The existence of the code is "hidden", in other words, it becomes apparent and can be discovered only with the help of other phenomena, for example, through the public brandsymbols as a sign system. J. Fiske defines cultural code as a system of signs controlled by the "certain rules prevailing among the certain representatives of a certain culture, and which is intended for the generation and circulation of meanings in this culture and for this culture" [5, 4]. And the meanings, as it is noted by R. Wagner, "are forming and organizing the cultural life" [8].
It is to the point to draw an analogy of brands with the specific characteristic of postmodern culture "blip-culture", the concept which was introduced by the American philosopher, the author of the post-industrial society conception, A. Toffler [3]. According to the scientists, instead of the massive all-embracing ideas integrally linked together in today's changing world, we deal with new images and representations — "blips" of information: short
messages, announcements, commands, headlines, fragments of the image, collages, which do not fit in the old information-systematic schemes and cultural codes. A. Toffler believes that modern information represented in "blips" has a pretty strange, flowing, and simple form. Facing such a blip-information, people feel freer and more confident, because they do not try to fit new understandings and meanings into the standard categories and frames, borrowing a ready-made ideal model of reality; instead they, again and again, arrange everything in its sole discretion, forming an acceptable models of communication, which open more opportunities for the development of the personality, and demassification of the individual and culture in general.
Today we can say that the public sphere, and branding in particular, as a separate publicity technology, is a symbolic "blip-culture" capable of transmitting the experience of the symbolic interchange of the carriers of different cultures, becomes an act of information and cultural exchange, and assumes a reflexive subjectively-objective interconnection. Since the reflexive connection is the basis of any communication, it is the ability of people to personify and accept the roles of others.
An important cutoff of the socio-philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of publicity is the consideration of its technical nature in the integrative unity "publicity — advertising". On the integral transformations in the public sphere, which called to
life the powerful, effective techniques and technologies, depends the improvement of the advertising and its transfer to the level of a comprehensive public business technology of the modern information society. A promotional product is inherently a public act, ensuring the existence of a social memory, the preservation, and transfer of information, both to different generations and within a single generation. Due to its public presence in social life, it is able to fix in a person the stereotyping of actions, supporting them by their automaticity and spontaneity. Public advertising business technologies is a combination of the qualified skills, equipment, infrastructure, tools and relevant technological knowledge, necessary for the realization of the desired changes in materials, information and people. In the knowledge of technological advertising dominates a practical aspiration of the subject (on the basis of cognition of social reality laws), which focuses on more complete acquisition of current trends in the society and, consequently, their use in the transformative promotional activity (for example, cross-cultural features of the interactive cooperation are widely used is promotional products of high quality).
Thus, modern public communications is a complex socio-philosophical phenomenon, which uses in the cross-cultural space the modern communication techniques and technologies, contributing to the rapid cultural integration and interpersonal adaptation in the global information space.
References:
1. Arendt H. Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben. - Saint Petersburg: Aleteia, 2000.
2. Bodrunova S. Koncepcia publichnoi sfery i mediakraticheskaia teoria: poisk tochek soprikosnovenia// Jurnal sociologi i socialnoi antropologi. - 2011. - 1: 14.
3. Toffler A. The third wave'. - Moscow: AST, 2004.
4. Leeds-Hurwitz W. Semiotics and communication: signs, codes, cultures. - Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993.
5. Fiske J. Television culture. - London: Routledge, 1999.
6. Habermas J. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. -Cambridge: Polity, 1996.
7. Habermas J. Further Reflections on the Public Sphere. - Cambridge, 1992.
8. Wagner R. Symbols that stand for themselves. - Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
