donchenko_angliyska_ddlya_psikhologiv_i_sotsiologiv

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II. Translate the text in writing:

STUDYING MASS COMMUNICATION

The American society is constantly changing. The mass media supported by that society are also changing. In some part, the process is reciprocal. That is, the society influences its media, but the media, once in place, sometimes modify the society. These facts make the search for stable generalizations about the personal, social, and cultural influence of mass communication a difficult one. For example, as will become clear from the examination of studies of the movies of the 1950s, such films apparently had a significant impact on the children of that particular period.

But the films of the 1950s, and the responses made to them by young people during the time, offer few reliable guides to relationships between media and youth of more contemporary generations. Since the media first arrived, each succeeding decade has brought a different set of economic conditions, new technology, changing political demands, and a continuously developing culture. In this dynamic milieu, the media continued to change their form, content, and distribution. This, in turn, modified the influence that they had on the people who attended to them. The process continues, and it will go on into the foreseeable future.

What this means for the student of mass communication is that the question of what influence mass communication has on people is an extraordinarily complex one. These are few

«eternal verities» that can adequately desribe the effects of all mass media on all people during all historical periods. Even a conclusion about the influence of a particular medium that seems inescapably true for a specific category of people during a given period may prove to be invalid at a later time. This is not

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to say that no stable generalizations can be found through an examination of the major research studies of the past. There are also a few generalizations that appear to have wide applicability under a variety of times and circumstances.

In an ideal world, science would proceed very systematically to accomplish its twin goals of innovation and accumulation. In such a world, some studies would move forward the cutting edge of theory and method whereas others would replicate and confirm earlier findings. Such an ideal science would be self-policing, and the generalizations accumulated would be both reliable and valid. Unfortunately, things seldom work out so neatly in the real world of scientific investigation. Studies in almost every field are undertaken for a bewildering variety of reasons, ranging from the trivial to the profound. Thus, the accumulation of knowledge is often frustratingly uncoordinated.

The study of mass communication has been particularly unsystematic. It is not a concisely defined field, and it has had only a relatively brief history. One problem has been that those who have studied the media in the past have come from several different disciplines. Some were investigations that led researchers to conceptualize the process of mass communication in a new and important way. Others introduced innovative methodological procedures, techniques, or strategies that made a lasting contribution to the scientific study of mass communication. And still others played a particularly important part in shaping the beliefs of the non-scientific public about the nature of media influences.

They all represent attempts to study the media within the framework of science. In some cases the research efforts were programs rather than single projects. Some were based on elaborate experiments; others used survey techniques. One was based on a purely clinical strategy. But above all, these appear

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to us as the ones that have made the most difference. They have been widely cited; they have stimulated extensive further research; some have created substantial controversies; but above all, they have attracted the attention of the community of communication scholars, and in many cases the general public, to provide important perspectives on the process and influences of mass communication.

III. Translate the text in writing.

FROM SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY TO SOCIOLOGY

(by Igor Kon)

The Ideological and Theoretical Premisses of

Sociological Knowledge

Sociology arose in the middle of the nineteenth century as an independent science of the patterns of development and functioning of social systems, not because a new object of study had appeared, but because problems had developed in other social sciences that could not be tackled by the traditional means and within the bounds of the existing system of knowledge.

The sociological vision of the world presupposes (1) a view of society as a systemic whole functioning and developing according to its own laws; (2) a conscious stance on study of actually existing social relations; (3) reliance on empirical methods of research in contrast to speculative philosophical constructs.

The elements of this approach were built up gradually within the context of social philosophy and the philosophy of

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the history of modern times, and as empirical studies and the differentiation of social and humanitarian sciences.

The problem of society as a system had already been posed by seventeenth-century theories of «social physics».

Insofar as society was represented as part of nature, social science became methodologically a part of natural science. While the stellar world was depicted in these theories as a mechanical interaction of celestial bodies, society was regarded as a kind of astronomical system of individuals connected by social attraction and repulsion.

The thinkers of the seventeenth century, having taken mathematics (geometric method), astronomy, and mechanics, as the model of science, endeavoured to treat not only history but also social statistics (which was making its first significant advances at that time).

The social philosophy of the eighteenth century, which was orientated to Newtonian physics rather than to astronomy and geometry, was already not so mechanistic and was more careful about its generalisations.

Mediaeval philosophy and its ideological heirs (Romantic traditionalists) represented society as an organic whole, as a community in which socio-economic ties were inseparable from moral ones and were personified by traditions and religion. The Enlighteners counterposed to that idealised image a

«mechanistic» model of society based on division of labour and rational exchange between individuals. The likening of society to a machine was naive, but it opened up a possibility of analytical clarification of the real functions of separate social institutions and subsystems (the state, law, economy, culture).

The difference between society and the state was first of all clarified. The first step toward that had already been made by the theorists of «natural law» and of the contract origin of the state.

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The English materialists of the seventeenth century (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke), the Scottish moralists (David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson), and the French materialists of the eighteenth century (Holbach, Helvetius) were in accord in considering human behaviour as egoistic in principle, directed to attaining some personal advantage. But it was only a step from reducing the motives of the social behaviour of the individual or group to the interests of the latter to establishing the dependence of those interests on the individual's or group's real socio-economic position. The thesis of the clash of social interests led logically to a conclusion about incompatibility of the conscious motives of individual actions and their social results. The Scottish moralists stressed that people's social behaviour was governed by irrational, instinctive forces and inclinations, and that people's deeds generated results unexpected for all the parties of this interaction. From that it followed that the structure and dynamics of the social whole could be explained without their being correlated with the consciousness of the individuals comprising this whole.

Clarification of the significance of economic property relations led social thought, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the problem of class differences and the functional role of social inequality. The English classical economists deduced the social division of society from the social division of labour. This led, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the concept «class» coming into use.

The «real» world of spontaneously shaped social relations came to be called civil society in contrast to the world of political and legal relations. That was linked terminologically with the traditional difference between civil (private) law and public law. But Hegel had already examined this matter more deeply, seeing civil society as simultaneously united (since no individual could

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get along in such a society without others), and divided, torn by contradictory selfish interests.

The attempt made by Vico at a conceptual delimitation of society culture, and the Enlighteners' development of the idea of progress were very important achievements of eighteenthcentury philosophy.

The Enlighteners' theory of progress, which played the role of the ideological foundation of the new epoch, largely paved the way for the evolutionist schemes of the nineteenth century. But the linear conception of social development often took on a frankly teleological character: the goal postulated by the philosopher in fact played the role of the Providence.

In its application to historical material the idea of

«eternal» laws was very shaky. Attempts to explain both the general structure of society, and its concrete state at a certain moment of time, by one and the same formula, failed, while the identification of the concepts of social change, development, and progress created an illusion of the movement of history along a predetermined route.

Parallel with the speculative philosophy of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empirical social studies began to develop, above all social statistics. These investigations, arising from the practical needs of government, were originally local, imperfect in methods, and different in various countries. But they gradually gathered scope and force. In France the technique of mass statistical surveys and economic censuses was developed. The English «political arithmeticians» of the seventeenth century, William Petty, John

Graunt, Gregory King, and Edmund Halley, laid the foundations of modern demography and worked out methods of quantitative investigation of social patterns.

Looked at separately, the empirical studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seem only descriptive, without a general theoretical basis. But in default of a sociological theory these investigations were based on the conceptions of

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natural science and general philosophy. It is characteristic that there were many outstanding natural scientists among the founders of empirical sociology (for example, Halley, Laplace. Buffon, and Lavoisier), whose study of social processes was organically linked with their scientific activity.

These scientists did not simply «apply» the ready-made methods developed in the natural sciences to the study of social problems; many general scientific methods and theories were developed in fact on social material. A desire to get a rigorous mathematical formula of population growth explains the popularity of Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798).

In addition to social statistics the development of ethnographic studies at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries had great significance for sociology.

The «savage world» discovered by the first historians, travellers, and settlers was not so much just an object of study as an object of influence. But the Enlighteners' theories about

«natural man» stimulated a more and more active comparison of «civilised morals» and «savage»; the savage was now primitive man in whom Europeans could recognise features of their own history.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the word

«anthropology» still belonged to the lexicon of anatomy and meant «study of the human body». But Buffon was already defining it as the general science of human kind.

The first attempts at a systematic description and comparison of the ways of life of various nations were made in the eighteenth century (Joseph Lafitau, Francois de Volney).

The comparative historical method was being applied not only to study of «primitive» peoples but also to jurisprudence, folklore, and linguistics.

In the early nineteenth century speculative social philosophy was everywhere being counterposed by the idea of scientific «positive» investigation. The differentiating of scientific disciplines itself was also accelerated. Jurisprudence and history, political economy, ethnography, statistics, and linguistics were separated off from philosophy. That was a model for the rise of new disciplines, and at the same time

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increased the need for some new intellectual synthesis and nonphilosophical (in the sense of non-speculative) science of man and society.

IV. Translate the text in writing:

THE SOCIAL AND CLASS PREMISSES OF SOCIOLOGY

The birth of sociology was also linked with certain social needs. Just as the social philosophy of the Enlighteners reflected the breaking-up of the feudal order and the rise of a new, capitalist society, sociology arose as a reflection of the inner antagonisms of capitalist society and the social and political struggles generated by it.

The early nineteenth century was a period not only of stormy growth of capitalism, but also of the first clear display of its contradictions. The growth of industry and of towns was accompanied with mass ruin of the peasantry, handicraftsmen and artisans, and of small property owners. The extremely hard conditions of factory work and of the workers' life contrasted sharply with the growth of the bourgeoisie's wealth, provoking a sharpening of class struggle. The uprising of the Lyon weavers in France, the Luddite movement in England, and later Chartism, were evidence of the entry into the arena of a new social class, the proletariat. Disillusionment with the results of the bourgeois revolution and the «Kingdom of Reason» proclaimed by it swept broad strata of the intellectuals. The lost illusions were succeeded by bitter scepticism; the need for a realistic analysis and evaluation of existing society, and of its past, present, and future, was intensified.

The mode of that analysis depended on the thinker's class position. In the first third of the nineteenth century, three main orientations, and correspondingly three groups of thinkers, became clearly outlined in the socio-political thought of Western Europe: conservative traditionalists, bourgeois liberal utilitarians, and Utopian socialists, who not only

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embodied different intellectual traditions but also expressed the interests of different social classes.

The conservative traditionalists, like Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), and Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), held a frankly negative position in regard to the French Revolution of 1789 and its results. They associated the post-revolutionary development with chaos and destruction, which they counterposed to an idealised harmony and order of the feudal Middle Ages and prerevolutionary times. Hence their polemic against the ideas of the Enlightenment and the specific theory of society.

In opposition to the individualism and social nominalism of the Enlightenment, which treated society as the result of interactions between individuals, the traditionalists regarded society as an organic whole with its own internal laws rooted in its remote past. Society not only preceded the individual historically, but also stood above him morally. Man's existence was impossible in principle without society, which moulded him, in the direct sense of the term, only for its own ends. Society did not consist of individuals but of relations and institutions in which each person was allotted a certain function or role. Since all parts of this whole were organically interconnected and interdependent, a change in any of them inevitably disturbed the stability of the whole social system.

Satisfaction of fundamental, immutable human needs underlay the functions of social institutions. Disruption or weakening of the activity of any social institution therefore inevitably caused a disordering and disorganisation of the corresponding functions. It proved nothing that the social function of any institution or belief was harmful. Even prejudices sometimes performed a useful social role, uniting a group and strengthening its members' sense of safety and reliability. It was specially necessary for the stability of society

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to maintain those groups and institutions by which the individual was linked with other people and with society as a whole. Urbanisation, industrialisation, and commerce, which were undermining these traditional foundations of social being, did not lead to a higher form of social organisation but to social and moral disintegration.

Whereas the traditionalists regarded society as an organic whole that had to be understood in order to adapt to it better, the liberals saw in it an «artificial body», a more or less mechanical aggregate of parts that could be altered and improved by people's conscious activity.

Further development of capitalism fostered a polarisation of scholars' class positions. In the theories of the English utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill (1773-1836), social interest was wholly reduced to the sum total of private interests; «the bourgeoisie is no longer presented as a special class, but as the class whose conditions of existence are those of the whole society». Society, for Bentham, was a body made up of individuals who were regarded as its constituent members. While putting forward the principle of achieving the maximum good for the greatest number as a general ethical law, he at the same time considered socially normal and morally acceptable when people strove to achieve their own private interests, even when that did harm to others.

Social thinking did not develop just within the framework of bourgeois ideology. The Utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen was also based on a definite social philosophy on whose banner were the demands of scientific character, sobriety, and positiveness. The works of Saint-Simon (1760-1825) were particularly important on that plane. Utopian socialism was incompatible in principle with scientific investigation.