Communication, Modernity, and Society: Key Concepts
Communication and Modernity
Communication and modernity: Technical advancements have liberated individuals from the constraints of time and space, enabling constant communication and amplification. This progress, a hallmark of modernity, fosters freedom, individuality, the right to expression, and an interest in life skills. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the gradual opening of borders—both mental and cultural—facilitated trade, exchange of goods, services, and arts, linking communication and modernity. This relationship is a constant interplay of normative and functional values.
Normative values stem from communication’s central role in Western culture, emphasizing the link with others. This culture values the individual, freedom, law, and free expression. Communication is also central to democratic societies and inseparable from mass individualistic societies. Functional values, however, highlight the problem of mere expression over dialogue, leading to a focus on profitability and instrumentation in mass democracy. The recovery of the individual leads to individualism, and the valuation of exchange drives globalized economies. Communication is generalized to promote mutual understanding and democracy, meeting the needs of individualistic society. Communication skills mediate between these values, embodying modernization.
Communication Sciences
Communication sciences aim to study communication through interdisciplinary knowledge. Three pillars support this field:
- Interface of neuroscience and communication sciences: Focuses on cognition and the relationship between communication and the brain, including perception, memory, image processing, and speech.
- Interface of communication sciences and cognitive sciences/physics: Addresses communication between humans and machines.
- Centered science of man and society: Studies communication between individuals and communities.
Communication is a fundamental human activity, directly shaping our relationship with the world.
Communication Phenomena
Four phenomena characterize direct and mediated communication: techniques, standards, and values.
- The ideal of expression and exchange presupposes free and equal individuals.
- Media disrupts the relationship between media and society.
- New communication technologies change the terms of trade and power.
- These changes allow communities to interact and act upon the world.
Information shapes the world, accounts for events, and contributes to complex societies. It is inseparable from communication, which disseminates information and builds representations. Communication also embodies technical and cultural values linked to open societies and democracy.
Regulation and Functional Communication
Communication policy aims to foster sharing, developing functional communication through writing, sound, image, and data. It addresses trade, division of labor, and openness between societies. Functional communication is linked to communication regulations. These dimensions are related but contradictory, as the conditions for sharing are challenged by the mass distribution of goods and services to people with differing values.
Political Communication
Political communication studies the role of communication in politics, media integration, surveys, political marketing, and advertising. It encompasses any communication related to politics, involving politicians, journalists, and the public. It faces limitations in the relationship between speech and action and the growing influence of representative logic. Political communication drives public discourse.
Community
A community is a restricted social unit living in a closed economy within a territory, subject to collective disciplines to maintain cohesion. It involves weak ties, heterogeneous feelings, and attitudes learned through socialization. Community ties are often associated with conflict or violence, making ‘commonality’ a preferred term. Emotional community is one aspect of this process.
When a group’s survival becomes a shared goal, it may constitute a community or commonality.
Culture
Culture has three meanings:
- French meaning: Heritage, knowledge, and knowledge creation.
- German meaning: Civilization, integrating values, representations, symbols, and heritage.
- Anglo meaning: Ways of living, styles, everyday knowledge, images, and myths.
Previously, there was an opposition between elite and popular culture. Today, there are four types:
- Elite: Once dominant, now challenged by media culture.
- Media: Emerged due to democratization, cultural policy, and the rise of consumer society.
- Popular: Shared by fewer individuals due to social changes and the growth of media culture.
- Special: Questions popular culture, lacking a monopoly on legitimacy.
These four forms of culture coexist and interpenetrate through mainstream media.
Acculturation refers to changes affecting two cultures in contact, while multiculturalism refers to the coexistence of different cultures in the same area.
Public Space
The public space is central to democratic functioning, where an audience gathers to form opinions through reasonable discourse. In mass democracies, it is a large space with many issues, players, and information sources. It is a symbolic space where discourses are exchanged, requiring time, vocabulary, common values, and mutual recognition. It symbolizes democracy in action, linking anonymous citizens and giving them a sense of political participation. It implies autonomous individuals forming their own opinions.
Common, Public, and Political Spaces
Common space is the initial space, symbolized by trade and solidarity networks. Public space is a physical space that emerged with the separation of the sacred and temporal, recognizing the individual. Political space is about deciding and acting, expanding with democratization.
The common area involves movement and expression, the public discussion, and the political decision space.
Identity
Identity is the characteristic of being identical, whether through continuity or similarity. Cultural identity is about sharing the same essence. It is a system of representations, feelings, and strategies organized to defend its purpose. It is a structured coordination of behaviors and a legitimate perspective.
Individual
The individual can be defined through two approaches:
- Psychological approach: The human being as a unique biological unit.
- Sociological approach: The unit that societies are composed of.
Society protects individual rights, and each person possesses inalienable natural rights, making the individual the source of all power.
Modernity
Modernity is a historical period that began in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, affecting all forms of culture and existence in Europe. It is characterized by a shift from tradition to reason.
Philosophical and political elements: Enlightenment values challenged tradition, emphasizing reason. New political thinking replaced God with society as the basis for moral judgments. Modernist thought saw humans as part of a world governed by natural laws.
The decline of ideology and practices led to postmodernity, where social identity is defined by consumption.
Modernization
Modernization is the process of societies entering the industrial era. It involves mobilization, differentiation, and secularization. Mobilization is the establishment of free movement between individuals. Differentiation involves a social division of labor, and secularization is the separation of church and state.
Civil Society
Civil society emerged from the French Revolution and the concept of the nation-state, representing the private domain. It designates organized social life according to its own logic, ensuring economic, cultural, and political functions.
Mass Individualistic Society
The mass individualistic society is characterized by the recovery of the individual and the majority. The market economy facilitates the transition to a mass consumer society. The crisis of the social bond arises from the difficulty of balancing this model. Primary social ties have disappeared, and there is no clear relationship between the mass and the individual.
Contradictory dualities weaken social relations, such as individual-mass, equality-hierarchy, and openness-closing.
Tradition
Tradition is a doctrine or practice transmitted through the centuries. It is a way of thinking, doing, or acting inherited from the past. It is a living experience that adapts over time. No society changes radically; each stage of change requires elements of stability.
Postindustrial Societies and Postmodern Culture
Postmodernism is a cultural age corresponding to post-industrial society. Post-industrial society is characterized by technological development, a decrease in agricultural and industrial workers, and an increase in professionals and scientists. Production shifts from large series to small series, with constant innovation. Agricultural production also changes, becoming more natural.
Marketing strategies also evolve, with supermarkets adopting differentiated selling policies. Post-industrial production requires constant upgrades and innovations, which bureaucratic regimes struggled to adapt to. These changes have led to new demands on the education system, requiring workers with good general information to adapt to new technologies.