Communication culture: light and shadow

Abstract

The culture of mass communications, namely as culture, is capable of changing the world, changing countries, organizations, people. It is mass communications with a culture of knowledge and technology that are becoming the leaders of change, as the instruments of these changes are images that are created by sociological, semiotic, artistic methods, which change the original essence. The images are global in their essence and the building materials for them are artifacts extracted from past eras; this is the essence of the present, these are forecasts - dreams of the future. This building material is accumulated by all historical and modern knowledge, and therefore it is fundamental. If this material forms the content of mass communications, they are able to resist the radicalism of postmodernism. The authors show that today the very driving force of social change is transforming: it is becoming the information environment, which carries certain images through information technologies, which make it possible to effectively respond to the challenges of a civilization - high-tech and market one. The analysis of changes in the value system of European civilization in the information age allows the authors to demonstrate that the driving force of its development is fundamentally shifting into the sphere of changes in essences, influence on people, into the sphere of "processing people by people", which becomes total. The materials of the article may be useful in the framework of the training fields of "Journalism" and "Advertising and Public Relations"