Page 131 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 131
i. bijuklič ■ manufacturing and selling a way of life
Communication as a Form of Social Ordering
During this period of crisis, another specific debate came in the forefront,
which brought together all the prominent Progressive intellectuals of the
era, from John Dewey, Charles H. Cooley, Robert Park to Walter Lip-
pmann. The point at issue was unfolding around the question of how to
find a new cohesive force that would unite a heterogeneous population of
millions of immigrants. Especially considering that the traditional com-
munity’s way of life and local town-meeting practises in the vanishing na-
tion of villagers and farmers could not be practised nor be cohesive on the
scale of the new continental nation, now interconnected and interdepend-
ent for the first time with various means of communication like railroads
and telegraph. The disintegration of traditional community’s way of life
and the total absence of any other binding tradition, not to mention the
threatening pre-revolutionary conditions, offered an opportunity for Pro-
gressive ideas to fulfil the gap and solve a potentially fundamental politi-
cal question of organising a national state in the only way they could im-
agine. Namely, as a matter of applying new scientific techniques, as a task
of social engineering that would elevate the state of human affairs and
cultivate human nature with the same fruitful results as natural sciences
achieved before them with dominating nature.
The primary attention in the discourse of social sciences was thus
given to the notion of communication attributed with a fundamental so-
cio-formative function, that of creating a substitutive bond, a certain uni-
ty of life, behaviour, thought, idea. Not communication as a primarily
human capacity of speaking, dialog or exchange of opinions, but as an
instrumentum of assimilation and psychological standardization, a con-
trollable and manageable process, which »creates and maintains society«
(Belman in Rogers, 1997: p. 196). The urge to invent and propagate ade-
quate social forms of life in order to enable an industrial society to func-
tion effectively, be able to multiply and accelatere its own processes in or-
der to achieve affluence, was rooted in the traditional creed that praised
America as the land of prosperity and comprehended as its continuation
by completely new means. Social sciences established communication as
their concept mostly by recapitulating the old usage in modern natural
sciences where the notion appeared in discussions on magnetism, more
accurately, how distant bodies are affected or attracted at distance in a
transmission of forces. Understanding and researching communication
as a separated and available object with its own inherent laws that, once
discovered, would make it disposable for steering social processes, like
analogies about communication as a society’s nervous system suggest, es-
129
Communication as a Form of Social Ordering
During this period of crisis, another specific debate came in the forefront,
which brought together all the prominent Progressive intellectuals of the
era, from John Dewey, Charles H. Cooley, Robert Park to Walter Lip-
pmann. The point at issue was unfolding around the question of how to
find a new cohesive force that would unite a heterogeneous population of
millions of immigrants. Especially considering that the traditional com-
munity’s way of life and local town-meeting practises in the vanishing na-
tion of villagers and farmers could not be practised nor be cohesive on the
scale of the new continental nation, now interconnected and interdepend-
ent for the first time with various means of communication like railroads
and telegraph. The disintegration of traditional community’s way of life
and the total absence of any other binding tradition, not to mention the
threatening pre-revolutionary conditions, offered an opportunity for Pro-
gressive ideas to fulfil the gap and solve a potentially fundamental politi-
cal question of organising a national state in the only way they could im-
agine. Namely, as a matter of applying new scientific techniques, as a task
of social engineering that would elevate the state of human affairs and
cultivate human nature with the same fruitful results as natural sciences
achieved before them with dominating nature.
The primary attention in the discourse of social sciences was thus
given to the notion of communication attributed with a fundamental so-
cio-formative function, that of creating a substitutive bond, a certain uni-
ty of life, behaviour, thought, idea. Not communication as a primarily
human capacity of speaking, dialog or exchange of opinions, but as an
instrumentum of assimilation and psychological standardization, a con-
trollable and manageable process, which »creates and maintains society«
(Belman in Rogers, 1997: p. 196). The urge to invent and propagate ade-
quate social forms of life in order to enable an industrial society to func-
tion effectively, be able to multiply and accelatere its own processes in or-
der to achieve affluence, was rooted in the traditional creed that praised
America as the land of prosperity and comprehended as its continuation
by completely new means. Social sciences established communication as
their concept mostly by recapitulating the old usage in modern natural
sciences where the notion appeared in discussions on magnetism, more
accurately, how distant bodies are affected or attracted at distance in a
transmission of forces. Understanding and researching communication
as a separated and available object with its own inherent laws that, once
discovered, would make it disposable for steering social processes, like
analogies about communication as a society’s nervous system suggest, es-
129
