Page 67 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

42 Guy Poitevin

Computer documentary and inference techniques may play an import-
ant role in readjusting this trade-off.

Notes

1. In 1852 France, following the defeat of the socialist and republican move-
ments of February and June 1848, and after the Restauration of the Empire,
a decree of the Minister for General Police, Charles de Maupas, prohibited
chapbooks and ordered their confiscation. This gave the newly appointed
deputy secretary to the said Minister, the enthusiastic and grateful Charles
Nisard, the opportunity to ‘collect these booklets and study them with the
most scrupulous zeal’ in order to properly counter the ‘disastrous influ-
ence that exerted over all the minds a number of bad books that hawking
circulated almost without obstacle all over France’ (Nisard 1864).
2. This should not make us forget that under the Stalinist regime, people
from Ukrainia, for instance, were severely prohibited from singing their
traditional songs. Were they caught or denounced to the state authorities,
party officials or KGB, they were harassed, jailed or sent to gulags in Siberia
for a crime of illicit nationalism against the Soviet Empire. Still, mothers in
hushed voices continued teaching their daughters a patrimony which was
then secretly recorded by Catherine Azad and Frédéric Gonseth. See their
chattering documentary film L’Ukraine à Petits Pas, 1992, Télévision Suisse
Romande, and their several recordings on CDs titled Ukrainian Voices.
3. Michel Authier and Pierre Lévy (1996) draw the theoretical and experimen-
tal outlines of such a democratic sharing outside the settings of academic
systems.
4. Debray (1991, 1997) deals with ‘mediology’ as science of the transmission
processes and modalities.
5. See Goody (1977, 1986, 1994). The author deals with the difference that
writing brings about with regard to the social organization of societies
in comparison with societies that know only oral traditions, and with the
transition from oral regime to the ‘script economy’ as support of institutions
and symbolic structures of control and dominance.
6. Orality has often been referred to as privileged stake and milieu of spon-
taneity and autonomy vis-à-vis written dominant traditions. See Iyengar
(1983), Poitevin and Rairkar (1996), Richman (1992) and Singh (1993).
7. This word cannot be translated because its French equivalent, ‘popularity’,
has already been devalued by the use that we made of it, though it is in
relation to ‘people’ the analogous of ‘nationality’ to ‘nation’.
8. See Vernant (1988: 196–200). The passage from speech (parole) to writing
(écriture) had far-reaching impacts on cognitive processes.
9. Among recent works of social scientists, one comes across two general ten-
dencies about the concept of popular culture: for some, ‘popular’ refers to