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British Public Thinking and Hungary...

and the reorganization of political Systems.⁷ This phenomenon can be seen at present too but now it occurs in a morę complicated form as the speed and accessibilty of information on the one hand democratized communication on the other hand the complexity of technical eąuipment and tools and the rapid growth of the ąuantity of information make it unreal for one user to rule the system individually.⁸

These complex relations mean a new challenge but also new opportunities. With the help of the history of the media, history writing can discover new lay-ers of political and social history which was less important up till now.

The changes of the second half of the 20^th century drove the attention to cultural history besides social history. It went through a serious evaluation and we can speak about its rebirth. A new cultural history was born besides the western Marxist, civil progress, modernising concepts and culturalism with the help of and by antropology and its concept of science, social history and related Sciences and with the help of the methods and approaches of sociology.⁹ The Europę centered - from an East-European point of view - mainstream history writing had to face the fact that the analyses and descriptions of societies out-side Europę can hardly or cannot be interpreted by these traditional European approaches. It was also elear that the new applied methods would encourage researchers to find other approaches to the history of Europę too. A new ten-dency emerged: from these new researches and analyses to understand the gi-ven cultures or societies.¹⁰

The aim of the German ‘Univesalgeschichte and the French type historio-graphy born in the 18^,h century was to create a global history writing which tried to organise the different categories of knowledge such as political, eco-nomic, social and cultural history. The most traditional approach is political history, however, the neglected ąuestions of the role of politics nowadays have come through serious reevaluation. The history of the media that analyses the most complex social ties raises deeply such problems which are of political naturę (the questions of ideology, rule and political participation, tools of central administration, and the ąuestions of ways of possible contestation).^{1 2}

The French revolution and the industrial revolution, which started from Britain, speeded up the development of capitalism and together with this the formation of civil society. The eąual society of bourgeoisie became the idea of

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1

⁷    Ibidem, p. 15.

⁸    Ibidem.

⁹    Dobszay T., Fónagy Z., Muvelddestórtenet, in: Bevezetes a tarsadalomtórtenetbe. Szerk.: Body Zsombor, 0. Kovacs, József Osiris Kiadó, Budapcst 2003, p. 391-392.

¹⁰    Ibidem, p. 394-395.

2

   Barbier F., Bertho Lavenir C., A media tórtenete, Osiris Kiadó, Budapest 2004, p. 16-18.