Context in International Political Communication: Take on Media and Takeover by Media

Introduction

There is a virtually untranslatable post-Soviet joke regarding DVD:

There is no known way to translate that joke into English without making it looking surreal but joke, eventually, can be explained: in Ukrainian and Russian languages see, look, watch and stare are virtually almost always represented with one word. Such vocabulary problem makes for a funny joke in Russian and Ukrainian which is a spoof of a common tagline for movies on DVD, but looses discernible context as soon as it enters many other languages, including, as we’ve proven, English.

However whole notion that one might look at something that is not traditionally considered a media outlet and still see one is surprisingly popular in Ukrainian and Russian idioms, with a popular idiom heard from an every iron. Translation of that idiom is equally hard as the previous case as even when explained that iron in question is the one for pressing one’s clothes, idiom does not make much sense. Meaning behind the idiom is basically that of overwhelming media presence, usually used in the context of popular music, however used surprisingly often nowadays for politics and other figures of power, despite their media presence was, until recently, expected to be in each iron.

In spite of being invented when media hardly was at the stage of radio, the iron idiom works greatly to describe the abundance of media surrounding us every day, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, to a point that many people try to develop media diets.

Background

Comedy often provides the sense indirectly, using objects as embodiments of situations, symbols of certain problems. Such types of communication are often called softened by specialists in different fields and one of the primary examples is found in a Japanese tradition of ikebana – bouquets of flowers, combined with certain systematical approach, served not only as a decoration, but also as an object of conversation which later moved on, swiftly or slowly, to other topics. Ikebana was crucial because Japanese culture does not tolerate well direct eye contact and so such was moved to a certain object of interest. In our everyday life we use softened communication to form stable social contacts – people tend to show each other objects of shared interest, which strengthens the communication and makes it all the more diverse. Sociologists of the late twentieth century theorized that mutual viewings of the movies fulfill essentially the same function. (Gorelov & Yengalychev, 1991, p. 99)

Age of social media had approached us in the second decade of twenty-first century and we have to deal with the fact that younger people know each other instantly, by reading small summaries of interests, provided by social networks. In many cases we don’t need crucial changes – professors will mostly naturally be older then the learners and so, importantly, they’re not only providing students with certain skills and knowledge of need. They’re also providing a cultural background, thus ensuring the stable progression of culture (on both national and international levels), which go on without major skips. Moreover, social networks are not working for everyone and, while they’re improving communications significantly in many aspects, in some aspects they also tend to decrease humankind’s crucial ability for social adaptation. Standardized profiles of social networks are likely to deceive into thinking that we know each other while in reality we barely familiarize ourselves with even own vague interests. Thus, inclusion of movies about social outcasts and rebellious individuals, dare to defy the system, (as exemplified by The Matrix) in the education processes may ensure that people educated will consider thinking ‘out of the box’. A quality, considered crucial for inventors, researchers, innovators or just effective, communicative people of their own age, who need to have qualities way beyond their competition to stay relevant in the global interdisciplinary world, rapidly approached by automation.