The category of context for a generation’s life: socio-cultural aspect

The article substantiates use of «context» in generational studies as an independent concept describing social reality. A multilevel methodological system analysing generational interactions from social, cultural and psychological points of view is presented. Social contextual phenomena were localized by frames of social-cultural interactions; these frames have to three main, non-hierarchical forms, namely, the time-space frame in which generational interactions take place; the frame of experienced social and cultural events; the frame of a generational discourse. The structural factors of the time-space frame are the social-psychological space of society, the territorial distribution of a particular socio-cultural life style, and the time during which the socio-cultural style is stable. These distinguished factors indicate the boundaries – the frames of the context for a generation. We propose to use single vectors as dimensions in the generational space: length means a social-historical influence of a particular socio-cultural style, height means power of socio-cultural changes; width means territorial coverage of socio-cultural changes. The line of social and personal events was used as reference points for social-cultural style deployment. The third determined context frame – a generational social-cultural discourse is represented by the non-static, incomplete determination of social-psychological positions that belong to the time-space of a particular social-cultural style. The social-cultural discourse is defined as knowledge, which acts, first of all, as a regulator of the boundaries between existing and future possible non-material capital / resources of reality. Secondly, such discourse is a result of generations' social interactions during cultural and social debates in order to find conformity of generational texts to the social reality. Third, such discourse is a living language for generational messages, this language is incomplete, is changing because of the time-space events. We should note that the discursive frame of the context systemises the formed time-space meanings and senses, but show only their spatial presentation without achievement a final design. We believe that the «context» term, used as a modern category, is an important tool for cognition of the reality, namely, for understanding of the psychology of generational interactions.