EKONOMICKÝ A SOCIÁLNY ROZVOJ SLOVENSKA

lose its basic role. The degeneration of the identity contributes to the polarization of
both public space and society. The division criterion often becomes the social status.
People responsible for shaping public space should counteract social polarization and
gentrification, ie the process of driving less wealthy residents and users out of particu-
lar public space. This is a dangerous phenomenon, which attracts the attention of not
only architects and urban planners, but also, if not most of all, urban sociologists and
environmental psychologists.
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1.1 Media space and a territorial self-government unit
The universal access to the media has revolutionized the life of modern man. Infor-
mation has become an important tool for shaping attitudes and interests. It influences
the development of different spheres of human personality. Information provides a
number of thrills, emotions, intellectual experiences, it brings the world closer, forms
imagination and social and moral attitudes. This impact becomes possible due to the
principle of versatility of information provided and the skilled choice of the tool to
provide this information. The significance of information in social space depends on
the media audience, their education and the familiarity with information channels as
well as the information needs of a given group. The media audience is the community
of mass media recipients.
There are two basic kinds of media audiences: the potential audience and the real
audience. The former one has potential to receive media communication – they have
access to a transmitter (eg newspapers, the radio, the television), the skill to use it (eg
ability to read), free time to receive a radio or TV programme. The real audience is
the audience who actually reaches the communication and attempts to receive a given
medium regularly. It is important to define the borders and scope of the audience both
in geographical and social terms and to know its make-up, its macro- and microstruc-
ture, and how it takes shape and transforms.
The mass media audience is characterized by the heterogeneous social make-up,
the anonymity of its members, weak interactions between them, their physical disper-
sion and isolation, loose organization and no capability of permanent cooperation
(joint initiatives are one-off occasions). [3].
Nevertheless, the very issue of the influence of the mass media is extremely com-
plex, not to speak about the numerous meanings of the term ‘influence’. The defini-
tion of ‘influence’, ‘the influence of television’ in particular, indicates that the scope of