leisure, media, culture

Kapitola se věnuje česko-slovenské komparaci způsobů trávení volného času s „kulturou“, tedy kulturní spotřebě, ať už jde o navštevování kulturních představení (např. divadla), nebo i recepci umění a konzumaci mediálních obsahů (jako je čtení knih, novín, sledování televíze apod.). Autoři na základě dat z koordinovaných výzkumů volného času a kulturní participace hledají odpověď na otázku, zda je možné v kulturních preferencích Čechů a Slováků najít nějaký klasifikační systém kulturního vkusu a zda v tomto systému preferencí existují mezi našimi národy nějaké rozdíly.

The chapter deals with the cultural participation of Czechs and Slovaks. The authors try not to separate the activities related to cultural events from trends in media use. They use Joshua Meyrowitz’s idea that, as a result of the development of the media, the information worlds of children and adults or women and men are merged, and the differences between the private and the public disappear. There is a sense of detachment from physical location. Both nations were compared based on leisurely cultural activities performed in the private sphere (reading, watching movies and television) and away from home (visiting concerts, theatres, museums or galleries) and in terms of taste. The results of the corresponding analyses confirm that in both countries, homology is present in the form of a link between high and low culture and high and low social status. On one side of the spectrum, there are activities related to higher social status (visits to galleries, classical music concerts, theatres or ballet) and on the other side there are lower status related forms of cultural participation (discos, rock and pop concerts and cinema). Similarly, TV programmes fit together to produce three types of tastes—male popular (popular action-related movies, sports, romantic movies and series), female popular (popular romantic films, series, reality shows, together with the unpopular action-related films) and high-cultural (favourite documentaries, art films, news and unpopular reality shows). In both societies, leisure is defined by a combination of educational status on one side and age together with sex on the other. At the same time, it is possible, especially in the younger generation, to observe the trend of a certain individualisation of cultural tastes. This phenomenon results in a blending of high and low culture, and the choice of different styles from different time periods.