Television and mass culture. Television and mass culture Direction of mass culture examples

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Adapted to the tastes of the broad masses of people, it is technically replicated in the form of many copies and distributed using modern communication technologies.

The emergence and development of mass culture is associated with the rapid development of mass media, capable of exerting a powerful influence on the audience. IN media There are usually three components:

• facilities mass media (newspapers, magazines, radio, television, Internet blogs, etc.) - replicate information, have a regular impact on the audience and are aimed at certain groups of people;
• means of mass influence(advertising, fashion, cinema, popular literature) - do not always regularly influence the audience, are aimed at the average consumer;
• technical means of communication(Internet, telephone) - determine the possibility direct communication person to person and can serve to transmit personal information.

Let us note that not only the media have an impact on society, but society also seriously influences the nature of the information transmitted in the media. Unfortunately, the demands of the public often turn out to be low culturally, which reduces the level of television programs, newspaper articles, variety shows, etc.

In recent decades, in the context of the development of means of communication, they talk about a special computer culture. If previously the main source of information was the book page, now it is the computer screen. Modern computer allows you to instantly receive information over the network, supplement the text with graphic images, videos, and sound, which ensures a holistic and multi-level perception of information. In this case, text on the Internet (for example, a web page) can be represented as hypertext. those. contain a system of references to other texts, fragments, non-textual information. The flexibility and versatility of computer information display tools greatly enhance the degree of its impact on humans.

At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century. Mass culture began to play an important role in ideology and economics. However, this role is ambiguous. On the one hand, mass culture made it possible to reach wide sections of the population and introduce them to cultural achievements, presenting them in simple, democratic and understandable images and concepts, but on the other hand, it created powerful mechanisms for manipulating public opinion and forming an average taste.

The main components of mass culture include:

• information industry- the press, television news, talk shows, etc., explaining current events in clear language. Mass culture was initially formed in the sphere of the information industry - the “yellow press” of the 19th - early 20th centuries. Time has shown the high efficiency of mass communication in the process of manipulating public opinion;
• leisure industry- films, entertaining literature, pop humor with the most simplified content, pop music, etc.;
• formation system mass consumption, which centers on advertising and fashion. Consumption here is presented as a non-stop process and the most important goal of human existence;
• replicated mythology- from the myth of the “American Dream”, where beggars turn into millionaires, to the myths about “national exceptionalism” and the special virtues of one or another people compared to others.

XX century to characterize the changed place of culture in modern society. The time of its appearance was the middle of the 20th century, when the media (radio, print, television) penetrated into most countries of the world and became available to representatives of all social strata. The exceptionally intensive development of the media and communications has led to the fact that not an individual person, but a large number of- a lot of people. Unlike elitist culture, mass culture focuses on the average level of mass consumers.

The phenomenon of mass culture reflects the impact of the modern technogenic world on the formation of human personality. It is unique as the art of manipulating elementary “sub-human” reactions and impulses (“drives”) of masses of people, using the most refined achievements of culture (technology and science). A system of proven techniques is created, designed for the simplest unconditional reactions, attraction, increased eventfulness, and shock moments are used.

Mass culture is emphatically focused on entertainment, quite cheerful, and in many ways exploits such areas of the human psyche as the subconscious and instincts.

Let's consider the influence of television on popular culture.

Television is a very young cultural phenomenon, which, when it arose, had to be integrated into the already existing “system of things” and into the corresponding system of ideas. For comparison: when the first car was created (1895), its shape resembled the shape of a carriage and, we emphasize, could not be different: in the minds of both the creators of the car and all other people, the idea of ​​a carriage as the most comfortable means of transportation dominated. Let's call the carriage a model-prototype of a car in order to briefly characterize the phenomenon itself. The entry of television into culture demonstrates the same approach and, very importantly, something completely new.

When radio appeared (A.S. Popov, 1895), the prototype model was sounding human speech, and later sounding music, that is, phenomena dating back to the beginning of human culture. When cinema arose (the Lumière brothers, 1895, J. Méliès), its prototype models were theater (the European tradition dates back to the ancient theater of the 5th century BC) and photography (the founders were inventors L. J. M. Daguerre, 1839 , J. N. Niepce in France; W. G. F. Talbot, 1840-1841, in England), which, in turn, had painting as its prototype (origin - about 40,000 BC. ). Thanks to photography, cinema has already come closer to the “television effect” that interests us.

When television emerged, it did not rely on ancient prototype models; they were represented by radio and cinema, that is, new phenomena that themselves had not yet been sufficiently mastered by humanity (additionally: newspaper, an older model). Subsequently, the same effect was repeated with the emergence of computer culture (in particular, the Internet), where among the prototype models it is necessary to name, first of all, television. Behind the latest models ancient and even new models are viewed only historically, outside of current awareness, and this is something new that was formed in culture with the advent of television.

It is the renewal of prototype models that occurs in the culture of the twentieth century that can explain why the essence of television remains insufficiently identified.

The newest models themselves have not yet been fully mastered, which leads to a desire to rely on a more solid foundation (that is, a more familiar one).

Hence the concept of television as a new art form. There was an extensive discussion on this matter. From the stated point of view, its hidden meaning is in drawing an analogy between television (new in culture) with art (old, mastered, understandable in culture) or in criticizing this analogy.

One can provide a large amount of evidence confirming that television is a special form of art (or more broadly, artistic culture).

Then, having accepted the general thesis, it is necessary to take the next step - to compare television with various types art (artistic culture). No matter how the specifics of the artistic possibilities of television are revealed, its tendency to be secondary and focused on a multimillion-dollar audience, that is, the features of mass artistic culture, will inevitably come to the fore. This, it seems, led to the now traditional idea of ​​television as a form of mass culture (which acted as an explanatory model-prototype of television). The concept of “mass culture” is painted in negative tones, hence it is quite logical to transfer this emotional shade to the conceptual interpretation of television.

Meanwhile, television, despite all its external similarities to mass media artistic culture, plays a different role, obviously so new that it cannot be easily defined through analogy and requires special research.

A unique property of television as a communicative subsystem of culture is the transmission of images over a distance. It fulfilled mankind’s long-standing dream of a kind of “all-vision”, the ability to look beyond the horizon of visible living space. Thanks to this, television spread so quickly and widely and turned out to be so in demand by people.

“Television messages - especially now, with the presence of communication satellites - come from all over the world, which means that the great gift of television is that through it the whole world has gained visibility. And since TV does not “remove” the viewer from his everyday environment, on the contrary, it itself strives there, then together with television the whole world bursts into the home of an individual... In the era of television, it is not a person who travels around the world, but images from all over the world - from all countries and continents - rush towards the TV viewer and, having lost materiality, swarm around him - as if then to obediently fall into his “total social experience“and “model of the world,” wrote the famous television researcher V. I. Mikhalkovich.

Television expands the boundaries of the real world, accessible to human vision and comprehension, completes and complements the sociocultural space available to the individual, that is, it contributes to the formation of an individual image of reality. This means that a particular person’s requests for television as a source of information about the surrounding reality are, in general, the same as for reality itself.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu makes a very accurate observation: “For some of our philosophers (and writers) “to be” means to be shown on television, that is, to eventually be noticed by journalists or, as they say, to be in good standing with journalists (which is impossible without compromises and self-compromise). And indeed, since they cannot rely only on their works to continue to exist for the public, they have no other choice but to appear on the screen as often as possible, and therefore write at regular and as short intervals as possible works, the main the function of which, according to Gilles Deleuze, is to provide their authors with an invitation to television.”

Personality, constantly navigating in a world of changing social conditions, can impose a wide variety of requirements on television content. Life orientation is one of the most important functions of television in relation to the viewer, along with recreational and compensatory ones. For example, a person does not understand the sphere of self-realization. He lacks human interaction. He needs some kind of life alternative if the directly accessible social reality is not valuable and desirable enough. In search of answers to these requests, people also turn to TV.

Television programs, in turn, reflecting this or that part of social reality, organizing it, carry certain meanings of this reality that can influence a person, acting as sources of value alternatives for sociocultural guidelines in relations with the world. Therefore, special attention should be paid to such a feature of television programs as the formation of these alternatives for the viewer, and their specific content should be considered in the context of the three defining processes of human life: activity, behavior and communication. By perceiving certain meanings of television programs, forming new sociocultural guidelines on their basis, a person can form a personal value attitude towards them, and these new guidelines can, in the words of B.M. Sapunov, “to determine his life attitudes and behavior.” .

The role of television is characterized by multifunctionality. However, in the multiplicity of specific functions, two fundamental functions stand out, which allows us to talk about the bipolar functionality of television. The first function is informational. The second function is leisure.

The information function is a basic feature of television as a cultural phenomenon. To clarify this idea, let us compare the showing of a feature film in a cinema and on television.

In a cinema, no matter how poorly technically equipped it may be, we encounter the work of art itself, this is the form of its existence.

On the contrary, a film shown on television, even the most advanced one, is only information about a work of art (just as “La Gioconda” by Leonardo da Vinci, which we see in an illustrated magazine or book, is only information about a painting located in Louvre).

In a narrower and more familiar sense, information on television acts as a collection of information about events and news.

At a new stage in the development of television broadcasting (in our country since perestroika, in the West much earlier) information function television has fundamentally changed in content (and, as a consequence, in forms), because the very idea of ​​​​television information has changed.

The domestic viewer, brought up on the programs of informational and educational (with a clearly expressed ideological attitude) Soviet television, was amazed by the appearance on television commercial advertising. At first inept, imitating Western models, then more and more qualitative, even talented, she persistently interfered with the broadcast network.

Information-advertising permeates the entire sphere of television broadcasting. It is both open in nature (commercials) and hidden (mentions of advertising objects in the speech of presenters and participants in programs, clothes, hairstyles, other surroundings of characters that are authoritative for the audience, what they hold in their hands, what they touch, what they look at what they listen to, what surrounds them, etc.). Information about events, turning into advertising information, changes its structure.

Thus, the sequence of news programs of the Soviet period (official block - working life of the country - foreign news block - cultural news - sports - weather) is replaced by another sequence: the most sensational news (disaster, murder, etc.) - less sensational news (which includes, for example, the official block). If a major scientific discovery is made, this is the material at the end of the issue, but if a scientist received the Nobel Prize, this is the beginning.

In Soviet times, a certain percentage of negative news in the information program was established: no more than 40%.

An analysis of modern news shows that negative news prevails even on official channels. On some (for example, on “RenTV” with Romanova) their number reaches 90% and sometimes even more.

The news is interrupted by advertisements. A stable tandem emerges: the real news of the day is terrible (contract killings, corruption, wars, terrorism), catastrophic (hurricanes, tsunamis, mass epidemics), terrible for the common man (fires, leaks, failures in energy systems, water supply, sewerage, poor living conditions , low salaries, bribes of low-level officials, unfair trials, deprivation of benefits, rising prices for food, gasoline, increased housing costs, negligence in schools and hospitals, fraud, hooliganism, drunkenness, poverty), while in commercials the viewer is presented with an ideal, happy life(wonderful things - from tights to refrigerators, all washing powders, medicines for any disease according to the latest scientific developments, almost free loans for almost any amount, allowing you to dance even on critical days, pads, shampoos that add volume to your hair and mascara to your eyelashes, saving you from caries toothpastes and chewing gums, luxury cars and latest model computers, exciting films, grandiose concerts, political parties guarding the interests of the people).

These two blocks constantly alternate, collectively awakening the polar emotions of viewers, through which television culture essentially has a suggestive influence on the consciousness and subconscious of millions.

Sensationalism as a principle of presenting information on modern television turns out to be a connecting bridge in the bipolarity of the main functions of television - informational and leisure.

Television, reflecting new realities, has developed its own new forms that implement the leisure function. In the spectrum of these actual television forms, two television genres emerged that found themselves at different poles: the video clip (the brevity of which reflected the option of minimizing leisure) and the television series (the duration of which, reaching several thousand episodes, reflected the option of maximizing leisure). Between these poles, the talk show took an intermediate place, combining information and leisure as television functions, but not through sensationalism, but through the illusion of interactivity.

Mass culture does not express the refined tastes or spiritual quest of the people. The time of its appearance is the middle of the 20th century, when the media (radio, print, television) penetrated into most countries of the world and became available to representatives of all social strata. Mass culture can be international and national. Pop music is a vivid example of this: it is understandable and accessible to all ages, all segments of the population, regardless of level of education.
IN socially mass culture is forming a new social system, called the “middle class”.
The purpose of mass culture is not so much to fill leisure time and relieve tension and stress in a person in an industrial and post-industrial society, but rather to stimulate consumer consciousness in the viewer, listener, reader, which in turn forms a special type of passive, uncritical perception of this culture in a person. In other words, the human psyche is manipulated and the emotions and instincts of the subconscious sphere of human feelings and, above all, feelings of loneliness, guilt, hostility, and fear are exploited.

Elite culture