Social and cultural means of communication Nataliya Ikonnikova State University – Higher School of...

Social and cultural means of communication

Nataliya Ikonnikova

State University – Higher School of EconomicsJournal “Personality. Culture. Society”

(Moscow, Russia)

“Sociology at the Crossroads”Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia,

June 11 - 14, 2009.

http://top100.rambler.ru/top100/

Nataliya Ikonnikova Yerevan, June 12, 2009

Research questions Wherein does, in fact,

communicative quality consist of considered social interactions, and what within them is not communication?

Should I describe these interactions as cultural, or social, or social by their form and cultural by content or vice versa?

What is there within these interactions the role of things and corporeal context?

How does this corporeal communications effect upon local communities, professional nets?

Construction and/or imitationof identity by media


Any media not only reflects the position and the intention of the communicator. The reflection is a mask of the position and the intention.It is not construction, but imitation of social reality, that causes the hypocrisy in political, economic, public, and interpersonal interactions.

Social and cultural processes


Spiritual – corporeal tension and polarization’ ironic consequences


The choice of particular concept reflects the theoretical and evaluating position of the researcher, his readiness to look at phenomena as aspiration for one of the poles: spiritual (religious, existential) tension or passionarity (for example, in Lev Gumilev' concept), when the tension is considered as specific quality of social and cultural environment providing mobilization of cosmic, biological and other primordial resources for sustainable and positive dynamics of society.

… Ironic consequences


I may classify the moods of social and cultural mobilization as social forms and legalizing them from-beyond normative systems and, further, mechanisms of legitimizing: from mobilized development in Soviet-type society to religious ascesis.

There in Soviet-type society energetic (labour and material) components are redistributed for legitimizing and consolidation of norms of official ideology, as a result – the object articles of culture is weakened: materialism destroys material culture.

Paradoxical prosperity


Moreover, paradoxically, the reversal side of spiritual orientation is legitimizing of civil activity and emancipation of forms' creation of set of cultural artifacts: spiritual orientation creates prosperity. (An example is Weberian Protestant ethics, which is considered as the foundation of capitalism prosperity.)

Frame modification


Symbolic cultural media


Symbolic media consists of: the value normative code,

argumentation,

and affective tinting are aspects of the process

...and they need to be embodied in signs, things, buildings, bodies...

Normative social media


Social media are classified twofold: what kind of identity is reproduced (through what structural conjunctions actor is involved to the communication), and, second, what kind and scale of integrity is established.

Normative social mediaAt normative level (normative media) I

distinguish some types of social media: collective (constructing and imitating

different forms of communicative ties from kin to non-kin groups and collectives);

organizational (constructing communications, that vary from rigid and formal organizations, institutions and positions to social nets);

and personal. Personal social media construct or imitate communications, which take forms from spontaneous and impartitioned (between social roles and participations) “I” to competent (trained, well designed, represented, played…) and differentiated image (called me).


Institutional social media


institutions of formal competent (expert) communication;

institutions of public (civil) communication;

institutions of inter-, intra-, and trans- individuated dialogue.

Double corporeality: social body and artificial coat


There are social objects of two types. First type of social objects, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, is Alter (or Other) – other social mask, an identity, a group of membership. The corporeality is declined in social relations.

Corporeality can be interpreted as a double embodiment (according to Heidegger’s and Bakhtin’s ideas). The corporeality of personality consists not only of a body of an individual, but it is also doubling by means of the signs or social objects – the conductor (in terms of P. Sorokin).

Field testing


Religious values and norms structure the social conjunctions of the members of communities in their interrelation within different social institutes.1.The minor community appears to be “open” as number of member of large society, but it is close as identity by shared knowledge, values and norms.

2. The “communal body” and artificial corporeality are important media for even religious (not only for so called “youth subcultures”) identity presentation and, especially, (re)construction.

3. The symbolic media determines the demonstrated Otherness in body techniques (including dietary, hairdressing, signs on body and so on) and social coat (including clothes, processions, book sale, farming, employment overall and so on). Rejecting of common material culture, the community creates Alter forms of its own. The result is growing cultural corporeal diversity. In many cases this diversity don't stay only communal, it is commercialized and shared by other groups and subcultures.

Field testing


Conclusions• Communicative and sociological (critical)

analysis of social inter-(trans-) actions reveals both their social (organizational) and cultural (meaningful) aspects; their demonstrative and latent aspects

• The tension assembles communication process as bidirectional, both spiritual and corporeal poles are significant

• Any spiritual content does not exist for social agents if it is not embodied in some things, buildings, other forms of corporeality


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