±«Óãtv

A person who deals in words - be he or she a poet, writer, journalist, politician, etc. - could notice an overall tendency that the world slowly but surely moves from a monologue-dominant model towards dialogue-based communication.

Broadcasters are talking more and more not just about their programmes, but also about their audiences and user-generated content.

Thinking in social sciences is leaning more towards interactivity and co-operation, as opposed to authority and regulation.

Even parenting is more about finding common ground with your children, rather than flogging and smacking them.

As a public we are finding dictators who flex their muscles in international relations increasingly unpalatable and prefer diplomacy and compromises.

In short you understand what I'm talking about.

There's a deal of literature about this tendency and the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin is the foremost representative of this way of thinking. According to him, the novels of Leo Tolstoy are traditionally monophonic, whereas the literature of Fyodor Dostoevsky is based on different principles of polyphony and it is a dialogue constructed of different characters, voices and ideas that plays the main role.

Bakhtin goes further and says that in fact all literature is a form of dialogue. Even a monologue can be interpreted as a dialogue of a person with himself, a kind of autocommunication.

In my last entry we discussed the communication model created by another Russian philologist Roman Jakobson, which also shows that the prerequisites of any communication act are the sender and recipient of a message, the message itself, its reference, channels and code.

As we can see from that, it also supports the notion of an interaction between the sender and the recipient of the message - in other words the notion of a dialogue.

Philosophers like Nietzsche, looking at such tendencies, probably would have concluded or generalised that the world moves from a divine style of message to a man-to-man style, or that hierarchical structures of relationships are being replaced by horizontal ones.

Having described this background I have to say that some forms of word art are more adaptive and flexible towards that tendency than others. Journalism is one of them.

Now the whole pattern of modern journalism is changing to a kind of interactive, dialogical journalism, with the active involvement of the audience. Comments of the readers, calls of the listeners and vox-pops are commonplace in today's journalism and a part of the news coverage or a topical discussion.

Theatre and comedy also follow the same rules. Sasha Baron Cohen or his Ali G, Borat and Bruno, who mix up staged acts with 'raw reality', is the best example of that movement towards interaction and interplay.

But some genres - especially literature and poetry - still exist very much in the domain of monologue.

I can't say that there are no experiments there. One can argue that every reading by every reader is an act of interaction with and recreation of the text, but I am talking more about the immediacy of that experience.

Reading poetry aloud for listeners is one form, but there must be more revolutionary ways too.

Our experience of writing a short story together, when contributions from five continents come together, or the project of a newspaper of night dreams from all over the world - these are the artistic creations I mean.

The internet offers many opportunities to transform the world of 'I' into that of 'us' and I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

But for the time being, since I have quoted a number of Russians I will finish with a verse from another Russian - a late poet Yuri Kuznetsov:

One day the sun, fading,

Sparks the last flash - and forever...

And in the heart ... in the heart there's a surd moan,

And a man is looking for a man.