Media Culture and Social Representations

The private space is mixed with the public space by the means of the mass media. The newspapers, the radio, the television, the internet, are the ways by which the world invades the intimacy of the private home. After 1989 the news became a centre of attraction, as never before. The well known queues were forming, in the days following the December events, for newspapers. Time, however, has reduced the curiosity for information, but the radio shows and the televised news remained at the top of public preferences. The news is made of speeches in which a general system of signs is linked to a social structure. The modality of both encoding and decoding will be influenced by the social structure. Besides the ideology practiced by society, each individual has his own ideology and his own way of encoding and decoding a speech, depending on the ideological competence of the author and the receiver. In a first phase, the receiver establishes a relationship of identity between the world that the speech presents and his life experience. Our own experiences represent the prototype to which reference is made. Our entire experience is organized in the form of social representations. These representations have, for each of us, the role of criteria of interpreting the world around. It is the individual’s system of reference and it determines his behavior.