Communicative Principles of the Postmodern Social Reality Formation

Abstract

In the postmodern era, the classical subject-object model of constructing reality gave way to a distributed model suggesting that the truth is not a representative reflection of the existing world, but its dialogical construction in a communicative way. The mental representations developed by people become their common social reality, where the concentration of meaning is conditioned by internal linguistic references to other linguistic units and definitions, but not the outside world. In postmodernism, anthropocentrism is replaced by inter-anthropocentrism, where the sovereign subject of rationality is replaced by an intersubjective model focused on collective forms of activity with an emphasis on interpersonal relationships instead of a single individual. In the cultural space, there may be many realities competing for legitimacy, while the most successful elements in passing socio-cultural filtering are fixed as social values and norms. Public institutions are created on the basis of the realities formed in this way and supported by linguistic conventions and socialization, later becoming a part of cultural identity. The normative consolidation of social reality is determined by the information agenda leading to the fact that communicative mechanisms, in addition to the function of transmitting cultural meanings, have acquired the ability to form them.