RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

The term »mass medium« reveals a view of the masses as a disorganised conglomeration of lonely people with no coramon interests, no common aims. Their only interests аге partial and these аге expressed by the leaders of different groups. Апу effort to create feedback if you treat an audience in this way is purely a technical, cybernetical ог numericai solution of the problem of human contacts, as it leaves these people where they were before, lone!y and lost in a mass... Is this not a clear case of failing to create another kind of feedback through the media of radio and television by building up psychological contact and the right mental climate through the jomt participation of the man in the studio and the man by his set. Is our radio listener (ог television viewer) condemned to the loneliness of a faceless atom in the mass audience? Or is he in his way a man-person-personality? In principle we favour the ancient saying - »Man is a yardstick« and not »a talking instrument«... However, in choosing this approach, it is clear that the radio ог TV worker himself must be a personality, a particular personality who is able to avoid putting himself in the position of a constituent part of the omniscient authoritarian machine (which automatically places the listener-viewer in the position of an object to be influenced!). The task of our radio or TV worker is to behave in just the same way as the Other sitting by his set. This is a creative act in which the man in the studio and the man in the audience make up one uniquely joined participant-creator. In other words, one is participating in anđ one is creating an event which starts from the studio, using all the possible means of expression of the medium, and which takes place and is built on by the mental activity of the listener or viewer. It is then that these free self-managers can search for certain phenomena in the creative act, discover similanties and differences in these phenomena, examine their causes and effects, in a word, their essence, and in the course of their own activity, adopt their own personal attitudes. These attitudes in turn form the basis for action in ajoint effort to change the picture of the world and realitv around them.. This tvpe of radio and television establishes live communication, sets up contact between one шап and another, one personality and another, and offers man the opportunity to participate in evaluating information, deciphering metaphors, building up something in his own head, then building onto it, adding on to what is created as a sort of co-author of his companion in the studio, and bemg witness