A Common Ground
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 1971
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The British academic and Assistant Director General of UNESCO Richard Hoggart explores the concepts of communication in his Reith lecture series entitled 'Only connect'.
In this lecture entitled 'Common Ground', Richard Hoggart evaluates the role of passing information to each other via a system of communication. He asks, now that we have developed at an almost unbelievable speed, what happens next? Are we really more in touch now than previously? How will new technologies bring us closer? Centralised mass societies are keen to show they understand the human scale but can human societies remember to interact with each other in a fundamentally kind and moral way?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.0 | This lecture in the series Only Connect, given by Richard Hoggart, was originally broadcast in 1971. |
| 0:10.9 | These talks have been about culture and communication, though I avoided that phrase as a main title, because it sounds too abstract and specialist. |
| 0:19.9 | They've been about our common life and the quality of that life. |
| 0:23.6 | And there's another phrase, the quality of life, which embarrasses a lot of people |
| 0:28.6 | and is carelessly used by others, but can't really be done without. |
| 0:32.6 | Because a culture will always produce a picture of the world and ask its people to accept it and approve it, and the values which stem from it. |
| 0:41.3 | So to talk about the quality of a society's life isn't, as some people seem to think, to produce a sort of slide rule of externally verified desirable values and then measure the society against them. |
| 0:53.3 | It's to look and listen, to ask what values are encouraged within a society and what discouraged? |
| 0:59.0 | What does the society allow as norms without a risk for the individual of rejection or breakdown? |
| 1:06.0 | How are the society's patterns of values changing? |
| 1:09.0 | And when you're trying to understand the quality of a society's life, |
| 1:12.6 | you're listening to much more than words than its manifest assertions. |
| 1:17.6 | You're trying to interpret and shape into that whole which the members of the society find full of meaning, |
| 1:22.6 | its attitudes to children, to death, to ambition, to the old, to the individual conscience, to foreigners, to the sick, to learning, to leisure, to the arts, to the search for truth, to privacy, and so on. |
| 1:36.6 | We never make contact in a void. |
| 1:38.9 | By all kinds of means we express to others and to ourselves a sense of our relationships with the values of our culture, |
| 1:46.0 | our general acceptance of them, or our rejections, or are simply taking for granted. |
| 1:51.0 | Now, it would be pleasant to think that all the talk about communication today reflected and respected |
| 1:57.0 | this diversity and richness, but it rarely does. Communications has become a catchword, |
| 2:02.7 | a sort of cult word. Obviously, our means of passing information of one sort or another, |
| 2:08.6 | from one place to another, virtually instantaneously, to hundreds of millions, now all this |
... |
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