Preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory in the complex of journalism functions

Blokhin Igor' Nikolaevich ORCID: 0000-0002-6582-3951 Doctor of Politics Professor, Department of Theory of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya str., 7/9 i.blokhin@spbu.ru Georgieva Elena Savova PhD in Politics Associate Professor, Department of International Journalism, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya str., 7/9 kaob@yandex.ru Labush Nikolai Sergeevich Doctor of Politics Professor, Department of International Journalism, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya str., 7/9 n.labush@spbu.ru

Oleinikov Sergei Viktorovich Doctor of Politics Professor, Department of Journalism, State Educational Institution “Transnistrian State University named after. T.G. Shevchenko" 107 October 25 str., Tiraspol, 3300, Moldova olen_serg@inbox.ru

Addressing the phenomenon of cultural and historical memory in the context of journalism theory and professional practice is important for a number of reasons. In a theoretical sense, it is necessary to take into account the structural features of the phenomenon of cultural and historical memory and the dynamics of its development, changes and influence on the processes taking place in journalism under the influence of the formation of a new system of post-global world order. The question of the essential institutional features of journalism in the spaces of sovereign macroregions can be solved only in the search for supporting specific basic principles of the existence and existence of the profession. One of these principles should be cultural and historical memory, which has a national origin and institutional and cultural forms of expression, to which, among others (no less, but no more important), journalism should be attributed.

In the meaning of the transfer of cultural experience in the processes of specialized education and upbringing, cultural and historical memory plays the role of a worldview complex that allows preserving and reproducing the essential features of journalism in new generations of professionals. Familiarization with cultural and historical memory in education has two features: specifically professional, which allows you to rely on the achievements of predecessor specialists, and general cultural, related to the national and civilizational basis of values.

The practical applied implementation of pedagogical educational and educational tasks involves: mastering the skills of adapting the content and subject matter of journalistic works to the valuable cultural and historical experience of media audiences; developing the skills of conceptual representation and regulation of cultural and historical memory through the selection of characters and the management of storylines; constant accumulation of knowledge about the past and their use in professional work. A separate area of practical appeal to cultural and historical memory is journalistic historical specialization, expressed in a systematic and analytical way of knowing the past and a popular scientific form of displaying historical facts and historiosophical knowledge.

Methodology and methods of research. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory in the complex of functions of journalism as a social institution. The object of research is the complex of functions of the Institute of Journalism, the subject of study is the specificity of the manifestation of the function of preserving and reproducing cultural and historical memory.

The objectives of the work are: to determine the functional structure of the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory with the participation of journalism; to identify similarities and differences between historical and journalistic methodology of public knowledge; to substantiate the interdependence of the structure of historical fact in journalism and the spaces of its disclosure, deployment and implementation.

The methodology of system analysis is used as a fundamental principle in the work. In determining the functional structure of the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory with the participation of journalism, approaches developed within the framework of structural and functional analysis were used. Comparative analysis is used to identify similarities and differences between historical and journalistic methodology. In determining the interdependence of the structure of a historical fact in journalism and the spaces of its realization, discourse analysis is used in its functional application in the form of a discursive framework that sets the parameters for including the fact in the narrative. The methodology of the spatial approach is applied to the allocation of spaces for the realization of the fact.

Literature review. Classical approaches to the definition and analysis of cultural and historical memory are described in sufficient detail in numerous studies of the phenomenon. Let us draw attention to the conclusions that are important for the theoretical understanding of the functioning of journalism in the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory.

One of the first to address the potential of journalism in the context of memory was the Russian philosopher N. F. Fedorov (1829-1903). In the work "The Museum, its meaning and purpose" (published in 1913), arguing within the framework of his worldview concept of "common cause", he highlighted the attitude of journalism to cultural and historical memory as a universal museum, which, according to the philosopher, should become the focus of world heritage: "Current journalism can be considered as one of the parts of the disintegrated Museum, whereas journalism, freed from the influence of hostile estates and even leading them, can create a museum, or a general editorial board of magazines, which will be a museum. <...> Current journalism is the opposite of the museum; it, representing a great power, is spent on the issues of the day… From the consciousness of journalism of its shortcomings, the museum project will arise..." ^{[26, p. 428]}.

The French social philosopher Maurice Halbwachs (1925) drew attention to social unity as an indispensable condition for the existence of cultural and historical memory: "... a society can live only on the condition that there is sufficient unity of views between the individuals and groups forming it. <...> ...society strives to eliminate from its memory everything that could separate individuals, separate groups from each other; in each epoch it processes its memories, coordinating them with variable factors of its equilibrium" ^{[28, pp. 336-337]}. Halbwaks stood on the positions of the sociological understanding of society as a system striving for balance through the elimination and overcoming of internal contradictions, and thus the task of social institutions, including journalism, is to ensure the unity of society.

British historian Frances Yates, in her work "The Art of Memory" (1966), highlighted the importance of imagery and visuality, techniques for capturing "places" and "images", in order to preserve cultural and historical memory: "The formation of places is of great importance, since the same location of loci places can be repeatedly used when memorizing different material. The images that we have placed in them to remember a certain number of things are erased and fade if we no longer use them. But the places remain in memory and can be reused when placing another series of images related to another material" ^{[12, p. 19]}. The role of visual aesthetics emphasized by Yates is directly related to the structures of media design and the forms of functioning of network communication.

The German historian Jan Assmann, the main theorist of cultural memory (1992), analyzes it in connection with communication: "individual memory is created in each individual due to its participation in communication processes" ^{[2, p. 37]}. The researcher separates communicative and cultural memory: "Communicative memory encompasses memories that are associated with the recent past. These are the memories that a person shares with his contemporaries" ^{[2, p. 52]}; "Cultural memory always has its own special carriers" ^{[2, p. 56]}. In the development of the idea of two types of memory, the thesis on the types of journalistic activity is substantiated: on the one hand, operational communication that ensures the functioning of communicative memory and the connection of living generations; on the other hand, the specialized work of traditional bearers who actualize history and participate in the reproduction of cultural values.

French historian Pierre Nora, known for his studies of "places of memory", analyzing the process of "acceleration" of history, the persistence of changes, highlighted the effects of accumulation and autonomization (2002). The accumulation generated by the uncertainty of the future "manifests itself as an inflated memory function and as a hypertrophy of institutions and tools of memory: museums, archives, libraries, collections, computer catalogs, data banks, chronologies and other things." Autonomization is characterized by the attitude to the present as a moment "between an unpredictable future and a past that has sunk into darkness, opaque to us" ^{[19, p. 397]}. Autonomization is associated with the processes of atomization of personality, the development of a playful attitude to reality and its past, the formation of personal "information bubbles" in the media space ^{[20, pp. 19-27]}, etc.

German cultural critic Aleida Assman identifies elements of media, environment and support in the memory formation system (2006). Depending on the form of memory – neural, social and cultural – social communication and symbolic mediators are invariably present as factors producing it ^{[1, pp. 30-31]}.

 Modern researchers of the phenomenon of cultural and historical memory focus on the interpretation of the concept ^{[3, 36]}, its role in the system of pedagogical activity and educational work ^{[18, 27, 38]}, various aspects of its functioning, such as the preservation of national identity ^[5], participation in the actualization of modern contexts ^[22] and the optimization of personal development ^[40].

Taking the position of a historical fact as a basic element of cultural and historical memory, it is necessary to address the justification of its concept ^{[6, 15, 25, 33, 35]}. The category of historical fact in modern research is defined in the context of fundamental philosophical approaches – ontologically ^[17], epistemologically ^[30] and methodologically ^[21]. The historiography of the problem is considered in connection with the evolution of historical knowledge ^{[11, 16, 34]}. The conceptual distinction between fact and event is given in I. V. Silantiev's work "Plot and Meaning". The researcher considers facts as "all more or less integral dynamic moments that a person isolates from a certain process, guided by a certain point of view. <...> An event is... a humanized fact. ...to qualify a fact, the criterion of being noticed (from a certain point of view, position) is sufficient. An event involves the involvement of a person in a fact or set of facts noted by him. At the same time, involvement can be not only socially situational, but also personal, and therefore the event is not just mental, but also distinctly axiological. The sequence of events described and narrated in a certain communicative act forms a narrative" ^{[24, p. 71]}. Similarly, the description of the author's work on the text, applicable to journalism, occurs, and journalism itself acts as a special type of form-making, fixing cultural and historical memory.

A special group of scientific sources is represented by works devoted to the problem of fact in journalism. When addressing this topic, researchers primarily focus on the applied aspects of the issue of the reliability of information, the technical and logical-algorithmic potential of its verification ^{[10, 13, 14, 37]}. A separate area is represented by works that identify the evolutionary trends in the development of fact journalism in connection with the normative, moral and ethical conditions of professional activity ^{[8, 31, 32]}. Since the most important consideration is the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory in the system of journalistic functions, it is necessary to refer to the provisions set out in the works, which analyze the functioning of journalism in a complex of value contradictions ^{[4, 9, 29, 39]}.

The results of the study. The use of the category of function in relation to the phenomenon of cultural and historical memory on the part of journalism presupposes the definition of the latter as a social institution, a subject initiating and participating in social changes. The functions of preserving and reproducing cultural and historical memory, in addition to journalism, are carried out by various institutions - family, education, literature, art, museum, etc. The Institute of Journalism participates in the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory, using all the variety of its functionality, which highlights the strategic and operational-applied levels.

At the strategic level, the functional complex of journalism includes, firstly, participation in the expansion of cultural space. Institutionally, journalism is objectively limited by the linguistic area within which communications are carried out, and foreign-language information penetrates into the environment of the area, passing through normative, value, technological, etc. filters, the development of which allows the expansion of cultural spaces. Journalism of regional, urban, and other settlement communities participates in the publication, preservation, and reproduction of historical knowledge, monuments, and facts integrating local cultural spaces. Secondly, strategically, journalism itself is a part of cultural history, a leading institution for the preservation of cultural and historical memory, semantic and value space of culture.

Among the operational and applied functions that are important in the cultural and historical context, the following stand out: socio-cultural integration, socialization of new generations, as well as adaptation of representatives of integrated communities. In an applied sense, these functions manifest themselves in a detailed description of historical facts, recording the testimonies of contemporaries as participants and observers of what is happening, analyzing direct (observed) and indirect (logically, analytically reconstructed) events.

The identification of strategic and operational-applied functional levels has an impact on determining the similarities and differences between historical and journalistic methodology. Thus, at strategic levels, both historical science and journalism participate in the formation of an integral social ideology that determines the goal-setting of social development based on the experience of the past. At the level of operational and applied functioning, historians and journalists collect and process factual information, use a unified system of empirical methods, analyze the data obtained using universal scientific logical algorithms. For a historian and a journalist, following the facts is a normative requirement, but at the same time "it is necessary to determine each time which frame of reference to choose for interpreting the fact (depending on the frame of reference, the scale, volume, and meaning of the fact will change)" ^{[4, p. 170]}.

A historical fact in journalism is revealed in accordance with its structure, which includes the event that occurred (denotation), the author's message (meaning), means of expression (meaning) and the ways used by a journalist to consolidate the understanding of the text (cultural concepts). I. A. Korolev notes that "a journalist is able to assess as objectively as possible only ... the denotative component, that is, to determine the truthfulness or falsity of the very core of the fact (event or phenomenon) on which it is based. At the same time, verification of the meaning and significance of a fact in any case implies certain interpretations based on the internal system of norms and values of a journalist" ^{[14, p. 110]}.

When determining the structure of a fact in journalism, it is impossible not to pay attention to the difference in the conditions underlying the types of professional activity. For example, the facts used in popular science journalism have their own specifics in comparison, for example, with the facts used by an art critic, etc. The difference in the conditions of disclosure, deployment and realization of the fact is manifested in the analysis of spaces, the implementation of journalistic activities, which are expressed in media products and creative works. The denotation has a framework normative meaning that cannot be ignored in the spaces of the natural world of nature (for example, in travel journalism), subject-material relations (for example, in historical journalism), social and communicative actions (what the so-called "journalism of facts" operates on). Compliance with the fact of natural, material and social spaces is associated with the achievement of reliability in presentation and trust in the perception of information by the audience.

The meaning that the journalist puts into the message reveals the personal space of the author's reality, which corresponds to the concept of the "life world" by E. Husserl. According to him, personalities "constitute various surrounding cultural worlds as concrete life worlds in which relatively or absolutely isolated communities live, acting and undergoing influences" ^{[7, p. 170]}. To identify the meaning, it is optimal to use the method of analyzing the journalist's discourse framework, which includes the model and type of media, genre and functions of the work, selected facts and their author's interpretations. The content of the author's interpretation is determined by reconstructing the procedures for selecting facts and their systemic composition in the work, choosing linguistic means, using terminology and evaluative vocabulary. At this semantic level, there are problems of correspondence between reality and reality, truth and truth, involving in the interpretation procedures, in addition to the author, also the heroes of the works, evaluating experts and, most importantly, the addressees of the message. The truth "turns out to be dependent on the psychology and mentality of both the author of the statement and the person who perceives this statement." In journalism, it "interacts with the peculiarities of the national picture of the world (linguistic or expressed in language), which for a native speaker will be true" ^{[9, p. 179]}.

The meaning as a component of a fact is determined when referring to the analysis of the media space, which, despite its secondary artificial nature, is also a specific environment for generating facts. The external influence on the attitude of journalists to factual material is exerted by existing forms of regulation of the volume of information and its content both at the level of individual media and national media systems: legislative and ethical norms, "self-censorship" in editorial policy, rules for blocking network resources, etc. Internal regulators are manifested in journalism when authors begin to focus on their own ideas about the state of public consciousness and audience preferences. The nature of such ideas is determined by the value environment of the journalist's personal media environment, his social experience and the dominance of certain ideas in the media space sector accessible to him. If we consider journalists as a group of opinion leaders who influence human behavior, then they become the object of manipulative influence communicatively and technologically: "On the one hand, historical memory in its media symbolic expression is an integral part of the cultural fund of society, is the basis for solving the problems it faces, on the other hand, at the level of mass consciousness, a media cliche, an extremely convenient tool in the hands of manipulators from ideology" ^{[23, p. 173]}.

The use of cultural concepts used by journalists to consolidate the understanding of the text fulfills the task of determining the meaning of the fact in the contexts of audience perception. To work with concepts in classroom contexts, it is necessary to categorize the fact as part of the conceptual structure depending on the levels of the text (text as a message, work, media and communication channel), coordinate the author's discourse framework and mental matrices of classroom groups (mass and target, chaotic and structured, rational and emotional type of perception) and use materials feedback and media statistics as indicators of the state of cultural and historical memory.

Conclusions. The inclusion of the issues of cultural and historical memory in the processes of professional journalistic education requires the approval of the principle of subjectivity of journalism, its institutional nature, which allows initiation and full participation in social changes. The preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory is present as an integral part of the complex of professional journalistic functions.

The functional complex of journalism manifests itself at the strategic level as participation in the expansion of cultural space and self-determination as an active part of cultural national history. At the operational and tactical level, journalism performs the functions of socio-cultural integration, socialization and adaptation.

The participation of journalism in the preservation and reproduction of cultural and historical memory is facilitated by identity with a number of areas of scientific and historical methodology: the formation of social ideology, the use of methodological apparatus, and the operation of facts.

The structural components of a historical fact in journalism (denotation, meaning, meaning and concepts) are revealed to varying degrees depending on the implementation spaces. The methodology of the spatial approach used in the study of journalism allows us to identify the natural, material, social, personal and mediated media levels of space. Denotation plays a dominant role on the natural, material and social levels, meaning plays a dominant role on the personal level, meaning plays a dominant role on the media space level, and concepts play a dominant role in audience feedback systems.