Page 62 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 37

the former power and authority of written texts tends to fade out. The
result is that the challenge nowadays lies less in the communication
media as such, than in their relationship with systems of socio-economic
and socio-cultural power. Symbolic systems and their representations
become an industrial asset and fall under the usual regulations of an
allegedly ‘liberal’ market economy.
In short, the multiplicity of processes of semantic restructuring at
the ideological level on the one hand, and the pressures of changing
socio-cultural environments on the other, are such that no tradition,
whether written or oral, whether elitist or popular, remains simply
identical over a period of time. No tradition worth the name is static, nor
is passed on from one generation to the next one as a pure repetition.
Generations follow one another, but rarely simply copy one another.
From where and how do they inaugurate the difference?
A final question to be raised in this context is, therefore, whether,
and if so how, does a tradition—highbrow or popular—remain faithful
to itself while transforming itself, progressing and evolving along the
flow of history and under the pressure of inescapable pressures—unless
it simply gives up its identity and disappears as a specific cultural
entity. When processes of transformation and inter-breeding are
intensely activated, the questions projected to the forefront are those
of continuity down the ages, heritage to be preserved as a live asset,
self-identification sought against a variety of competing traditions
and maintenance of identity in the middle of sweeping socio-cultural,
historical or technological transformations.

Cultures as Strategies of Identity

The relevance of culture for a given group consists in its function as
effective strategy of collective identity versus other groups or categories.
This identity should, therefore, not be understood after a static procla-
mation of patterns of beliefs, norms or codes inherited and faithfully
kept. Such a repetitive assertion would sound the death knell of that
culture, reducing it to the state of a fossil and signalling the historical
irrelevance of its carriers.
A given culture may first appear and be projected as a set of struc-
tures of signification and understanding shared by the members of a