著者

城野 充

出版者

日本スラヴ・東欧学会

雑誌

Japanese Slavic and East European studies (ISSN:03891186)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.17, pp.41-52, 1996

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It was "the public sphere", a space for the formation of public opinion to support Perestroika, that M. Gorbachev tried to create by means of Glasnost. In J. Harbermas' ideal terms, the public sphere is a social space where the circulation of information and views on questions of common concern can take place so that public opinion can be formed. However, in the Soviet Union this social space had been sealed since the 1930s. An open mass media is an essential element for the public sphere, since it permits all sorts of discourses to be freely communicated. Glasnost has opened the Soviet mass media to revive the public sphere. It goes without saying that Perestroika had a demand for the public sphere on a nationwide scale. In this sense it was very important that the television space has been opened by Glasnost. Glasnost in this television space appeared as a change from, in M. McLuhan's terms, "hot media" to "cool media". The Soviet TV program "The 12 floor" and "Vzglyad" have formed the television public sphere, and what these programs had in common was that both were "cool media". There we can recognize the formation of a polyphonic space where an ethos was rehabilitated and where a dialogue began to take place between "noises" that had hitherto been excluded. In other words, this space had the character of a public square. The public sphere in the television space had been formed by change: the "hot media" for monologue of the Communist Party was metamorphosed into a "cool media".