RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

The first and concise section on the theory of information is followed by a second one paying appreciably more attention to the Љеогу of mass communications and reflecting Đorđević’s conviction that these two theoretical fields are closely allied and have numerous features and inherent characteristics in common. As in the first section, here, too, social practices are the general basis for a theory concerning mass communications. In order to set up this science which he feels wou!d be effective in yielding knowledge of and explaining practices in communications and information, he subjects to analysis interpersonal communications, mass communications and their functions, the communicative act of intermediated communications, two-way and two-tiered communications, and mass media: the press and the mental and psychological, as well as the semiotic and meaning mechanisms of its action, radio, film and film presentations, television and its presentations. Đorđević’s is a many-layered book, segments of which are highly condensed and contain a concentration of descriptions of various kinds of experience found thus far in this field. However, there are other segments where more experience could have been incorporated. This applies particularly to the parts on aesthetic messages and linguistic elements in the system of communication and information. Consulting, for instance, Aristotle’s Organon would have enriched not only the historical dimension of Đorđević’s work but also the semantic sphere, othenvise very present in this book. Or the experience of Ernst Cassirer on the linguistic structure of informative practices, to which Susanne K Langer, whom Đorđević mentions and comments on in a number of places, is also indebted. A similar case is Arnold Gehlen’s, who saw language as a singular kind of communicative activity, ог Umberto Eco to whom Đorđevič owes the most in view of his basic starting point, that of seeing in the openness of works special possibilities for the openness of information, interpreting here works in a very broad sense, including television productions. Eco in his later research went even further and virtuallv equated culture

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