Reflection of Social Circumstances on Writing of the Serbian Specialized Magazine

Author: Marko Simendić (1985), 4th grade Philological high school, Belgrade

Abstract: The aim of this research is to show how the war and social, political and economic crisis are reflected on the specialized magazines which are not dealing with the above mentioned subjects.

Methodological approach
„Svet kompjutera” (The Computer World), the oldest Serbian magazine dealing with computer technologies was chosen as a pattern of the research. The magazine has been publishing since 1984. It’s a monthly one. The period from 1997 to 2002 has been investigated. This period seems to be the crucial one, regarding the purposes of the research. It is not only marked by the war but also by the economic crisis resulting changes on Serbian political scene. The initial phase of investigation consisted of gathering materials as well as a narrow examination of the archives. At the same time the contents were classified, but taking into account how extensive is the term of society it wasn’t easy to find one unique criterion for selection of contents. That’s the reason why the dominating social circumstances of that time made criterion for investigation. Selected were those contents which could give any figure about economic and political circumstances in FRY. After that, the contents were classified according to subject maters relationship. The comparative method, based on statistics has been used to recognize possible regularities between the social circumstances in Serbia and the appearing of corresponding texts.

Results and discussion
It was realized that economic situation could be followed through texts about development of Internet, domestic software, manifestations related to information technologies. The war has been followed through texts about simulation of combat airplanes, weapons on the Internet, media war, computer components and Internet gaming. Relating to political situation, articles dealing with legislature, as well as critique of the situation in Yugoslavia were analized.

Conclusion
According to the research, the texts in a specialized magazine are influenced by the social circumstances. This conclusion is based on fact that every magazine follows topicalities within its fields being in this way objects of projection of cause-consequence relationship between social relations and human activities. As a result of this, the dominating social relations can be monitored through the writing of specialized magazine. The reason for this kind of aproach lies in the fact that writing of this kind of magazine is hardly to be influenced by censorship, due to a fairly small number of readers and a narrow set of topics. However, a specialized magazine as a source of research may fail to provide information about those social relations that aren't dominating at a given time. There are better ways to investigate these relations, using other kinds of publications and document as a source, providing that they were not being subjected to censorship.

Translated by Ljiljana Glišović

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