Recently, during a conversation, one of my acquaintances told the creators of public opinion express one way or the other, and immediately a question occurred to my mind whether there are such people in Armenia. Who can be called so, what are the standards? If the standard is the mass popularity, then the well-fed up young man, whose big posters are posted everywhere in Yerevan, who probably will sing in overcrowded hall of the Sports and Music Complex, he is the right person to lead the public opinion, and if he, let’s say, says something about the Eurasia Union, “people” will follow him.
But it is obviously not so, being popular does not still mean to form a public opinion. I even do not know who were previously doing it. Paruyr Sevak, Hovhannes Shiraz, how did they affect the public opinion. In some educated circles (which, to be fair, were broader in 1960-70-ies than now), they were authorities, but to say that all Armenia was living with their expressed ideas, perhaps, would be an exaggeration. It is not an exaggeration with regard to the “Karabakh” committee in 1988. But here too, it seems to me, that a reverse mechanism was operating, the public opinion created those people, they were not leading the masses, but rather were led by them.
Let’s go back to the “traditional” methods of creating a public opinion. Television? Hardly. And the large portion of this fault lies on us, the TV reporters. The perception of inertia also plays a certain role, although today (I keep insisting) the situation is different than it was 10 years ago. Websites, social networks? There are two main powers operating here, the government, on the one hand (which, of course, has much greater resources), and the ANC and the PAP, on the other hand. But they are sources of party campaigns, and the users mainly understand it: they cannot significantly impact on the public opinion and be a universal authority.
Such authority, theoretically, could have had our priests. But the elite of the latter, given too much to secular enjoyments, and coalesced into the government, did not earn that reputation. It was clear still before the “offshore issues”.
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In short, I honestly do not know who and how the public opinion is formed in Armenia. Sometimes it seems to me that the taxi drivers who are reading lectures on political topics have taken this burden on them.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
