Yevgen Smotrytskyy


Philosopher. Publicist. Translator.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaiserslautern, Germany                                     smotrytskyy@gmx.de

 
 

 

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ИСКАТЬ НА OZON.RU

 

Yevgen Smotrytskyy


IATP - Ukraine's Internet window to the world

Every person has the right for life, freedom and happiness. One will hardly argue seriously with this Jefferson's triad. Philosophical disputes on the meaning of life, understanding of freedom and happiness are as eternal as human being's instinctive and intuitive striving for self-realization and achievement of a comfortable spiritual, psychological and material condition. Different epochs and cultures offer their own variants of answers and their own possibilities. The European culture added its word as well: it offered market economy, civil society and democratic mechanisms of social management. Having overcome all the difficulties and even growth illnesses, European culture displayed to the world an example of human greatness. Ukrainian aspiration for European culture and European community looks therefore quite natural. We should clearly understand the problems we face; we should almost feel the European culture and European lifestyle from within. United States of America render considerable assistance to Ukraine in this process. I would like to express here some ideas and impressions after training on Marketing in Internet organized in Kyiv by Internet Access and Training Program which is funded by the US government.

 


Evgeny Smotritskiy is making a point during the Internet and Marketing training, Kyiv
 

Reorganization of any social organism is naturally quite a painful process. Transition period in a society, as well as transition age in a teenager's life touches spiritual and material spheres of life, changes system of values, needs and opportunities, changes state and society functions, changes every person. It is not so easy to understand and even more difficult is to refuse the old stereotypes, behavioural habits and the acquired social roles, especially taking into consideration that a new turn in the society was very precipitant and unexpected. But there is no way back. There are no absolute repetitions in human life, neither in the history of society. There are loops of history, which enable returning to the main road of progress, which is ambiguous, inconsistent, not always clear but inevitable.

The way of market reforms and democratic transformations is declared the strategic direction of our society development. Any strategy is to be supported by tactics. Concrete measures, financial and organizational maintenance, legal base is what we need. And the most important is goodwill, knowledge and experience. In their absence all objectives will remain just declarations and all the creative efforts will become destructive agency instead. Various American programs aimed at support of Ukrainian market and democratic reforms propose to share knowledge and experience, to render technical and financial assistance.

The 'Marketing in the Internet' training was conducted in Kyiv by trainers from Minsk: Elina Sharkova (master's degree in the field of management teaching, a very experienced trainer, studied in the USA and France and had been teaching marketing in higher educational institutions of Minsk for many years) and Vadim Popov (system engineer, an expert in Internet technologies). The audience consisted of people belonging to different age groups (from 18 to 42), occupations (students, high school teachers, journalists, commercial companies managers, NGO representatives etc.) and widely representing different Ukrainian regions - Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Chernovtsy, Rivne, Sevastopol and, certainly, Kiev.

A little lyrical digression. As a teacher I was very pleased to see the active, keen, competent youth. Almost everybody can speak English fluently, a lot of students are study and work at the same time firms as managers or translators. They know about business not only by hearsay or from books, but from their own experience. Taking into account the awful heat, which made working conditions very difficult (and we had to endure that 6 hours per day), I am confident to say that these guys will have a good future. They will do business in any circumstances, will do it in the competent and energetic manner.

The training enabled its participants to get acquainted with the basics of the science about goods and services market promotion management, beginning from studying and analysis of supply/ demand and ending with the sale strategy. Due to the professionalism of the trainer Elina Sergeevna Sharkova the boring and seemingly commonplace trading issues sounded philosophically and touched deep layers of social and individual psychology. Believe me, there is no exaggeration in these words at all. For example, the value of market economy was deeply analyzed during the training. Value is a special philosophical concept. When a person recognizes one thing as valuable and significant and doesn't accept another, it means he or she makes the act of estimation and choice based on his or her world outlook and personal moral principles. And only after choosing one way or the other, the person starts performing an activity as a human being, i.e. in the conscious and responsible way. The trainer proposed everybody to think it over once again and formulate all pro et contra concerning the market and the most important field of market activities - marketing. Having divided the participants into two groups the trainer offered to prove one of the two theses: 1) Marketing promotes creation of artificial values and needs and thus harms both the person and society; 2) Marketing is the engine of progress, it promotes development of both the person and society. Both teams treated the question seriously and showed deep understanding of the problem essence. Arguments for the first thesis were the following. Market competition and marketing give rise to the situation when a person's needs are satisfied to the bigger and bigger extent. Laziness and human whim leading to human degradation and, speaking literally, to adiposity, thus are more and more supported. Furthermore, the market and marketing as though "forget" about the main source of prosperity, about the nature. The society with operating market mechanisms inevitably enters insoluble conflict with the nature. The next argument "against": in competitive struggle a "seller" becomes insincere to a "buyer", the seller is ready to sell the goods at any cost, " with the pasted smile ", which is definitely immoral. And one could even add more arguments against the market. These arguments have been well known for a long time. But, unfortunately, we have nothing better existing as for today, mentioned the second group of the participants. Market enables a person to realize his or her creative abilities, open his or her potential in competitive struggle and thus to achieve perfection. Market forms culture of manufacture, business relations, client service. Market does not forgive wastefulness, irrationality, and immoral attitude to the consumer, i.e. to the Individual. After voting it turned out that the majority is FOR market economy, FOR marketing as a tool of competent and successful work in market conditions. And it is clear since the planned economy only declared its advantages and clearly showed its lacks. Poor quality of goods and services, rudeness, irresponsibility and exhaustion of the environment became the norm of life everywhere where the planned economy was applied.

 


Vadim Popov, IATP/Belarus, making a presentation during the training in Kyiv
 

A theoretical digression. The moral penetrates into all spheres of human activity. Therefore both market and planned economy are supposed to conform to the moral standards. Yet, they are in some sense neutral about the moral. The moral is introduced in all fields of activity as if from the outside, from the sphere of culture. Moral standards, values, relations should provide stability for a society, "social health". Mechanisms of culture should provide the effective control over performance of moral standards. Any field of activity allowing anarchy inevitably leads to moral degradation. In this sense the Market forces a person to be moral while the Plan allows anarchy, which equals immorality. In the market economy the consumer (i.e. everyone) controls the quality versus the planned economy with its technical control department (i.e. the factory manager), which actually dictates a consumer the quality level and assortment of the goods and services. It means the Market is more effective not only in economic, but also in moral sense. In societies with market economy there are a lot of immoral things. It is true. There is violence and larceny, but the Market is only indirectly guilty of that. It is cultural degradation to be blamed - as a moral regulator it uses insufficiently effective mechanisms or only one mechanism - the Market and contractual relations. It is no longer the Market's problem, but the one of Culture. Only a person or human society can be either moral or immoral. There are enough sinful priests, aren't there? But it doesn't mean the whole religion is immoral.

If the market economy arouses spurn by its "pasted smile", then our society - by "sincere boorishness". That's why I propose to make choice towards the "pasted smile".

As a philosopher, I was especially interested how marketing solves one of its main tasks: segmentation of the market. Practically it is a new way of organizing social space peculiar to the market economy. One of the most amazing thinkers of the 20th century Pavel Florensky said: "…the whole culture can be interpreted as the space management activity". Being eternal, the problem of space management is acquiring a special urgency. We have little space not only on the market, but on the whole Earth as well. The art and science of space management increase our possibilities and help to get more place for the most people to live happily. Internet is further entering our lives. It has a new concept of time and space management. Naturally, Internet marketing is developing with fast pace. In more developed countries you can order all goods and services to your hope with the help of Internet. Of course, you would need well working e-mail. I think we have a long way to go to such use of the Internet, but it's necessary to develop Internet marketing for wholesale and sale of manufactured goods for non-mass usage. Therefore it was interesting to know how to use Internet with marketing purposes as Vadim Popov told us. Unfortunately, web sites of our domestic manufacturers, which were shown to us, set an example how you should not do, how to discourage the buyer to purchase even the best goods. Well, experience is not a thing you could buy, but everybody knows that it's better to learn by somebody else's mistakes. World practice has plenty of positive examples - take for instance trade mark Nike (sorry for unintentional advertising)…

During the training various business games were extensively used. The audience was getting a concrete problem and in the course of solving it had to apply the theoretical knowledge it had received at the training before. This teaching method helps to actively stir up thinking, focus and memory because it adds to the learning process an element of play and competition and emotionally brightens it up.

 


the rapturous audience is giving flowers to the trainer, Elina Sharkova
 

'Marketing and Internet' is just one of many trainings conducted by Internet Access and Training Program in Ukraine. This project is doing a great and important work by opening access to new informational technologies for alumni of US sponsored educational and cultural programs. To be more exact, Ukrainian scientists who studied in the USA now have a possibility to use all informational resources of the Internet, get training on Internet general literacy, specialized search, web design, and other. It's hard to undervalue the importance of this work. It gives alumni the opportunity to become full members of the world scientific community, introduce their achievements on the WWW, receive information about international science communications (conferences, symposiums, publications, communities, etc.), thus entering the level of international scientific contacts. Here is the practical way of Ukraine's positive image creation. I personally benefited from the Internet, as well as from financial and organizational support of the US Embassy in Ukraine, when got invitation to the 5th International Symposium on the Philosophy of Chemistry in Great Britain. I wouldn't even dream about it in the old days!

IATP is one of the programs administered by International Research and Exchanges Board, a non-profit organization aimed at supporting understanding and cooperation between United States and countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia and North-Eastern Asia. This organization provides a lot of potential for professional growth of Ukrainian scientists and journalists. For example, the Contemporary Issues exchange program supports investigators in the following fields of studies: market economy, democratisation and law leadership, political, military, social and security problems, stability of the civic society, Internet and copyright issues. Program titled Professional Mass Media known as ProMedia collaborates with independent newspapers, has a reference library and different computer databases in Kyiv press center for journalists. IREX also issues an on-line magazine SAPIENTI for alumni to publish their articles and research. Within the program Individual Scientific Research young investigators can actually conduct research, participate in conferences and consultations. Besides these programs, IREX administers a testing center where everyone can take TOEFL, GRE, GMAT and US Medical Licensing Examination. These tests open doors to American Universities.

To wind up the story, I want to say that the opportunities provided by American programs are boundless. Getting tangible results depends on how Ukraine, its scientists, teachers, journalists, NGO representatives use these resources. In any case we should thank Americans, their government and all people working on implementation of these programs in Ukraine. Thank you!

Evgeny Smotritskiy,
Dnipropetrovsk,
26/7/01

 

 

МОИ САЙТЫ

http://smotrytskyy.narod.ru/              - Персональный сайт Евгения Смотрицкого
http://www.sheynina-elena.narod.ru/ - Персональный сайт Елены Шейниной
http://www.vasiliy-shubin.narod.ru/   - Персональный сайт философа Василия Шубина
http://www.his-seminar.narod.ru/      - Сайт Днепропетровского городского семинара по истории науки
http://www.grunauer.narod.ru              - Персональный сайт профессора Александра Адольфовича Грунауэра

 

 

 


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