Comparing Post-Socialist Media Systems

Television Cultures of Socialist Yugoslavia

“…Interest in socialist television cultures represents a shift of the focus from systemic toward the more mundane, ordinary aspects of life under a socialist regime including popular culture (Luthar andPušnik 2010, Gumbert 2014;Peruško et al 2021). The underlying assumption here is that mundane practices reveal "the ways in which state power was exercised and negotiated at the level of personal experience and everyday life" (Luthar and Pušnik 2010, 1).…”

“…While the system approach analyses institutional constraints and the interactions between different subsystems, mostly from the perspective of political science and history, the cultural approach to socialism is concerned with the ways how "individuals supported, reinforced or resisted and challenged the political system, and how they appropriated material culture to cope with conditions of everyday life" and "the ways how society understands and represents itself and how it is constructed through representation and gaze" (Luthar and Pušnik 2010, 1). Focus on culture and everyday life recognizes the individual agency and its capacity to challenge and negotiate structural pressures (Peruško et al 2021;Peruško and Čuvalo 2014), enables avoiding of the simplified totalitarian perspective and sharp dichotomies between the official structures and everyday practices (Luthar and Pušnik 2010;Mihelj and Huxtable 2018). While the media system approach is focused on news media, media regulation and the position of the media system in relation to politics and the political system (Hallin and Mancini 2004) media cultures have been analysed in terms of their diverse genres and modes of communication, modes of production, audience engagement and their integration into globalized flows (Mihelj and Huxtable 2018;Gumbert 2014).…”

“…While the media system approach is focused on news media, media regulation and the position of the media system in relation to politics and the political system (Hallin and Mancini 2004) media cultures have been analysed in terms of their diverse genres and modes of communication, modes of production, audience engagement and their integration into globalized flows (Mihelj and Huxtable 2018;Gumbert 2014). The notion of media culture is here considered inseparable from the given media system (Peruško et al 2021), while in the case of socialist Yugoslavia we can analyse relatively diverse republican media cultures and media systems within the shared political and social system. Television is the first mass medium established during socialism and its establishment went together with the establishment of a socialist consumer culture (Duda 2015, in Peruško et al 2021.…”

“…The notion of media culture is here considered inseparable from the given media system (Peruško et al 2021), while in the case of socialist Yugoslavia we can analyse relatively diverse republican media cultures and media systems within the shared political and social system. Television is the first mass medium established during socialism and its establishment went together with the establishment of a socialist consumer culture (Duda 2015, in Peruško et al 2021. It is genuinely the main mass medium of socialist modernization (Gumbert 2014, Mihelj andHuxtable 2018;Peruško et al 2021).…”

“…Following the categories developed by Mihelj and Huxtable (2018) and Imre (2016), Yugoslav television cultures are here analysed in terms of a) generic composition and share of program modes, b) the level of transnationalism, c) the level of openness of television to social critique (semi-publicness), c) focus of television on private life (privatization), d) the gendering patterns, e) temporal orientation, f) characteristics of factual, humorous and history genres. Analysis is based on the data collected for the recently published book by Peruško, Vozab and Čuvalo (2021) and original content analysis of the JRT 79 Television Programme booklet, with a short description and basic info about the program that was shared within the JRT network. The result discerns differences between republic televisions (especially TV Ljubljana, TV Zagreb and TV Novi Sad) in program development toward neo-television, such as the differences in transnational orientation, temporal orientation, gendering patterns.…”