A HANDBOOK OF MEDIA

AND COMMUNICATION
RESEARCH
SECO N D EDI T IO N

QUA L ITAT IVE A N D QUA N TITAT IVE ME T HODOLOGIES

EDITED BY KLAUS BRUHN JENSEN

A Handbook of Media and

Communication Research

A Handbook of Media and Communication Research presents qualitative as well as quantitative

approaches to the study of media and communication, integrating perspectives from both the social
sciences and the humanities. Taking methodology as a strategic level of analysis that joins practical
concerns with theoretical issues, the Handbook offers a comprehensive and in-depth review of the
field and a set of guidelines for how to think about, plan, and carry out media and communication
studies in different social and cultural contexts.
The Handbook comprises three main elements:
An historical account of the development of key concepts and research traditions
A systematic section covering media organizations, texts, and users, as well as the wider social
and cultural contexts of media use
A practical element, taking readers through the various stages of a research process, including
illustrative studies, and reflecting on the uses of research in different social sectors.
Written by internationally acknowledged specialists and supported throughout by keywords,
updated references, and graphic models, the Handbook provides a standard reference work for
students and researchers in the fields of media, communication, and cultural studies.
The second edition of the Handbook has been thoroughly updated with reference to the development of the internet, mobile, and other digital media.
Each chapter addresses shifting configurations of established media organizations, media
discourses, and media users in networked practices of communication.
The introduction and one further chapter probe changing conceptions on mass and interpersonal, online and offline communication in research as in everyday life.
Three new chapters have been added to exemplify different forms of research employing multiple
methods to study multiple media in multiple contexts.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen is Professor in the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Recent publications include contributions to the International
Encyclopedia of Communication (12 vols, 2008 http:///www.communicationencyclopedia.com),
for which he serves as Area Editor of Communication Theory and Philosophy, and Media Convergence: The Three Degrees of Network, Mass, and Interpersonal Communication (Routledge, 2010).

A Handbook of Media and

Communication Research
Qualitative and quantitative methodologies
Edited by

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

2nd edition

First published 2012

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2012 Klaus Bruhn Jensen for the editorial material; authors for individual
chapters
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The handbook of media and communication research : qualitative and
quantitative methodologies / edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mass media--Research--Methodology. 2. Humanities--Methodology. 3.
Social sciences--Methodology. I. Jensen, Klaus Bruhn.
P91.3.H35 2011
302.23--dc23
2011018290
ISBN: 978-0-415-60965-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-60966-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-35725-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon and Gill
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

Contents

List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Preface
Note on the text
1

Introduction: The state of convergence in media and communication research

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

PART I HISTORY:
SOURCES OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

viii
xi
xiii
xiv
1

21

The humanistic sources of media and communication research

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

23

Media, culture, and modern times: social science investigations

Graham Murdock

49

PART II SYSTEMATICS: PROCESSES OF COMMUNICATION

67

Media organizations
4

The production of entertainment media

Amanda D. Lotz and Horace Newcomb

71

The study of news production

Stig Hjarvard

87

Media texts
6

Discursive realities
Kim Christian Schrder

106

Mediated fictions
Peter Larsen

131

vi

Contents
Media users
8

Media effects: quantitative traditions

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

153

Media reception: qualitative traditions

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

171

Media contexts
10

Communication in contexts: beyond mass-interpersonal and

online-offline divides
Klaus Bruhn Jensen

186

11

The cultural contexts of media and communication

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

203

12

History, media, and communication

Paddy Scannell

219

PART III PRACTICE: SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES AND

SOCIAL APPLICATIONS

235

Empirical research designs

13

The quantitative research process

Barrie Gunter

237

14

The qualitative research process

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

265

15

The complementarity of qualitative and quantitative methodologies in

media and communication research
Klaus Bruhn Jensen

283

Multiple media, multiple methods

16

Audiences in the round: Multi-method research in factual and reality television

Annette Hill

17

A multi-grounded theory of parental mediation: exploring the

complementarity of qualitative and quantitative communication research
Lynn Schofield Clark

18

Personal media in everyday life: a baseline study

Rasmus Helles

302

318
334

Contents
Communicating research
19

The social origins and uses of media and communication research

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

351

References
Index

371
412

vii

Illustrations

Figures
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
5.1
5.2
5.3
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
8.1
8.2
8.3
8.4
9.1
9.2
9.3
10.1
10.2
10.3
10.4
11.1
III.1
13.1

Constituents of communication
10
Four models of meaning
11
Three types of interactivity
15
The public-sphere model
17
An anatomy of media and communication research
19
A brief chronology of human communication
26
The hermeneutic circle
30
The process of semiosis
32
Two levels of signification
34
Exchange relationships in the production of news
93
Journalistic genres on a scale of opinion
98
Journalistic roles and types of discursive practice
99
Dimensions of critical discourse analysis
115
Characteristics of new media as communicative forms
122
Different approaches to qualitative discourse analysis
123
BP advertisement
128
The introduction to The Big Sleep 136
The actant model
140
A model of narrative communication
142
Eight levels of narration
143
The visual code of television news
145
The stages of communication, as defined by audience research traditions
154
Adoption of black-and-white and color television in the US
156
Dimensions of campaign objectives and effects
163
1995 chart of values among Danish media users
168
Milestones of media and communication research
172
Two varieties of reception studies
182
Three flows of media use
185
Communicative practices across media types
188
Horizontal and vertical intertextuality
192
Jakobsons (1960) model of communication
197
Language and meta-language
198
Three communication flows within and between countries
209
Six prototypical empirical methods
235
Types of validity
241

Illustrations
13.2
13.3
13.4
14.1
14.2
15.1
15.2
15.3
15.4
15.5
16.1
16.2
17.1
18.1
18.2
18.3
18.4
19.1
19.2

Advantages and disadvantages of different forms of survey administration

The normal distribution curve
A map of information flow links between major news media web sites in the UK
The role of language in qualitative methodologies
Production and reception discourses
Two paradigms of research
Six levels of empirical research
Dimensions of validity and reliability
Three domains of reality
Empirical microcosms, theoretical macrocosms
Public value of factual and reality TV in Britain and Sweden
Categorisation of factual and reality TV as informative and entertaining in
Britain and Sweden
Dimensions of parental mediation
Diffusion of personal media
Mobile media use and age
Normal and log-normal distributions
Age and text messaging
Types of media research organizations
Ten rules for the conduct of empirical studies

244
259
263
272
275
285
287
296
299
300
312
315
330
340
342
343
344
361
368

Tables
6.1 Use of names for the flu in Swedish Twitter
6.2 Representation of protagonists on Review of the Year 1998, BBC1 1998
13.1 Summary of a regression analysis for variables predicting four measures of
homicide newsworthiness
18.1 A typology of communicative practices

109
110
262
336

Resource Boxes
1.1
1.2
4.1
5.1
19.1

General reference works and journals

Selected studies and reference works for individual media
Online resources about entertainment media and production
Online resources about news media and news production
Histories of media and communication research as a field

3
4
86
105
357

Analysis Boxes
4.1
6.1
6.2
8.1
10.1
12.1
13.1
13.2
14.1
15.1
18.1

Studying media industries in the field

Content analysis of Review of the Year 1998, BBC1 1998
Discourse analysis of advertisement for BP
Correspondence analysis of living conditions, lifestyles, and media use
Search engines as communication and meta-communication
Historical research on archival data
Surveys and experiments compared: The case of cultivation research
Testing for statistical significance: Chi-square
Discourse analysis of qualitative interview data
The signs of science
Realism and retroduction

80
110
128
168
193
231
257
261
279
284
339

ix

Illustrations
18.2
18.3
18.4
18.5

Sampling and representativity

Reliability and validity
Mixing methods
Reduction in qualitative analysis

341
342
345
347

Notes on contributors

Lynn Schofield Clark is Associate Professor and

Director of the Estlow International Center for
Journalism and New Media at the University
of Denver. She is author of the forthcoming
Parenting in the Digital Age. Clarks first book,
From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media,
and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press,
2003), received the Best Scholarly Book Award
from the National Communication Associations
Ethnography division. She is also co-author of
Media, Home, and Family (Routledge, 2004),
and has had articles appear in the Journal of
Communication, Critical Studies in Media
Communication, New Media & Society, and in
several other journals and edited volumes.
Barrie Gunter is Professor of Mass Communications and Head of Department, Department
of Media and Communication, University of
Leicester, UK. He is a chartered psychologist
who has worked in the media sector as an
audience researcher and has written 50 books
and around 250 other publications on a range
of media, marketing, and psychological topics.
Rasmus Helles. Assistant Professor, Department
of Media, Cognition, and Communication,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His work
focuses on the everyday use of digital media, especially through log files as a source of empirical
data. Recent publications include articles on
mobile phone and internet use patterns.
Annette Hill is a Professor of Media at Lund
University, Sweden, and Visiting Professor at the
Communication and Media Research Institute,
University of Westminster, UK. Her research
focuses on audiences, with interests in sociology

of media and culture, everyday life, genres and

cultures of viewing, and media experiences.
Stig Hjarvard, Ph.D., Professor and Vice-Chair,
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He
has published books and articles on media history,
journalism, globalization, ratings analysis, media
and religion, and mediatization theory. He is chief
editor of Northern Lights. Recent publications in
English include The Mediatization of Society
(Nordicom Review, 2008), The Views of the
News (Northern Lights, 2010), and The Mediatization of Religion: Theorising Religion, Media,
and Social change (Culture and Religion, 2011).
Klaus Bruhn Jensen. Professor in the Department
of Media, Cognition, and Communication,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and director
of its research group on Digital Communication
and Aesthetics. Member of the Editorial Boards
for the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic
Media, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, Communications: The European Journal of
Communication Research, Comunicacion y
Sociedad (Mexico), and MATRIZes (Brazil);
Corresponding Editor for the European Journal
of Communication. Life Member for Service of
the Association of Internet Researchers and a
Fellow of the International Communicology
Institute. Recent publications include contributions to the International Encyclopedia of
Communication (12 vols, Blackwell, 2008
www.communicationencyclopedia.com), for
which he serves as Area Editor of Communication
Theory and Philosophy, and Media Convergence:
The Three Degrees of Network, Mass, and Interpersonal Communication (Routledge, 2010).

xii

Contributors
Peter Larsen. Professor at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University
of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of books
and articles on semiotics, rhetoric, music in the
visual media, textual analysis and text theory in
connection with film, television and other forms
of visual communication.
Amanda D. Lotz is an Associate Professor of
Communication Studies at the University of
Michigan. She is the author of The Television
Will Be Revolutionized (New York University
Press, 2007) and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (University of
Illinois Press, 2006), and editor of Beyond
Prime Time: Television Programming in the
Post-Network Era (Routledge, 2009). She is
co-author, with Timothy Havens, of Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University
Press, 2011) and, with Jonathan Gray, of Television Studies (Polity, 2011).
Graham Murdock is Reader in the Sociology
of Culture at the University of Loughborough,
UK, and has been a visiting professor at the
Universities of Bergen, Brussels, California,
Mexico City, and Stockholm. His work has
been translated into nineteen languages. Recent
books include, as co-author, The GM Debate:
Risk, Politics and Public Engagement (2007),
and as co-editor, Digital Dynamics: Engagements and Disconnections (2010) and The
Blackwell Handbook of the Political Economy
of Communication (2011).
Horace Newcomb is Professor of Telecommunications and Director of the George Foster
Peabody Awards at the University of Georgia.
Newcomb is the author of TV: The Most Popular

Art (Anchor Press, 1974), co-author of The

Producers Medium, editor of seven editions of
Television: The Critical View (Oxford University
Press, 1983) and editor of The Museum of
Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of
Television (www.museum.tv). He has lectured
widely in Europe and Asia on the current state of
television and culture.
Paddy Scannell. Professor, Communication
Studies, University of Michigan, formerly at the
University of Westminster, UK. He is a founding
editor of Media, Culture & Society, co-author
(with David Cardiff) of A Social History of
British Broadcasting, 19221939 (WileyBlackwell, 1991), editor of Broadcast Talk
(Sage, 1991), author of Radio, Television and
Modern Life (Blackwell, 1996) and co-editor
(with Elihu Katz) of The End of Television?
Its impact on the worldso far (Sage, 2009).
He is currently working on a trilogy, the first
volume of which, Media and Communication,
was published in 2007 (Sage), while Television
and the Meaning of Live is forthcoming, and
Love and Communication is in preparation.
Kim Christian Schrder is Professor in Communication Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark.
His books in English include The Language of
Advertising (Blackwell, 1985), Media Cultures:
Reappraising Transnational Media (Routledge,
1992), Researching Audiences (Arnold, 2003),
and Digital Content Creation (Peter Lang,
2010). His current research deals with news
consumption in the media landscape of the digital
age, and with methodological issues around the
quantitative/qualitative divide.

Preface

One of the chapters in the first edition of this

Handbook was entitled, Contexts, cultures,
and computers. The chapter was designed to
review research on the embedding of media in
diverse social and cultural contexts, emphasizing the growing role of the internet and other
digital media in reconfiguring the contexts of
communication in space and time, as material
as well as virtual relations. Ten years on, this
process of reconfiguration has been accelerated
to such an extent that an overview of the field
calls for a reconsideration of its constituent
categories contexts and computers, even
media and communication not just within,
but across chapters.
Throughout this second edition, the
Handbook highlights the interplay between
new and old media. It devotes a full chapter
to the increasingly counterproductive divides
of mass versus interpersonal communication
research, and of online versus offline interaction. And, it includes additional chapters
illustrating the relevance of a wide range of
methodologies old and new to a media environment in historical transition.
In its second edition, the Handbook provides
an updated account of the state of the field of
media and communication research its sources,
current debates, and future potential. A resource
for students, researchers, and media professionals, it offers an in-depth treatment of both
methodological approaches and theoretical
frameworks. The development of the domain of
study the media themselves has accentuated
the need to combine quantitative and qualitative
approaches to media and communication studies,
and to continue the integration, manifest in the

field during recent decades, of insights from the

humanities as well as the social sciences.
The Handbook grows out of several longterm collaborations. First and foremost, I am
grateful, both to the old hands from the first
edition and to the new contributors, for joining
me in this venture in a spirit of interdisciplinary
dialogue. Since the 2002 edition, I have received
much inspiration from the research group on
Digital Communication and Aesthetics that I
direct and, in recent years, from colleagues in
and around the Center for IT Innovation, both
at the University of Copenhagen. Farther afield,
I have been given a great deal of constructive
criticism on related papers and other presentations, not least in the context of the Association of Internet Researchers, the International
Communication Association, and the biannual
Nordic conferences on media and communication research. I also am privileged to serve
as Area Editor of Communication Theory and
Philosophy for the International Encyclopedia
of Communication, published in 12 volumes
in 2008 (Donsbach, 2008), and subject to
continuous updating in its online version, www.
communicationencyclopedia.com.
In addition to reworking the first edition, this
second edition of the Handbook draws on my
own recent title, Media Convergence (Jensen,
2010). The present volume incorporates some
portions of text from that other volume; specifically, Chapters 1 and 10 in this Handbook rework
parts of the monograph for present purposes.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Copenhagen, April 2011

Note on the text

Key concepts and terms are indicated by a

marginal note when they are first mentioned in
the text. The symbol in the text indicates a
cross reference to the preceding text which can
be found below. The symbol at the foot of a
column indicates the cross reference linked to
its mention in the above column.

Introduction
The state of convergence in media
and communication research
Klaus Bruhn Jensen

a characterization of the field as an interdisciplinary crossroads of different academic faculties

a typology of media of three degrees: humans as embodied media, mass media, and network media
a comparative review of definitions and models of the key concepts of information, communication, and action
an account of media as a distinctive set of institutions-to-think-with
an outline of the handbook, its purposes and premises.

Fields and faculties

The field of media and communication
research has emerged over the last half-century
at the crossroads of several disciplines and
faculties, which themselves had taken shape
over a period of 200 years. In 1798, around
the time of the formation of the university as
a modern research institution (Fallon, 1980;
Rudy, 1984), Immanuel Kant had identified a
conflict among its different faculties, arguing
that the humanities (the philosophical faculty),
not the theological faculty, should provide
the foundations for inquiry into natural as
well as cultural aspects of reality within the
other faculties (Kant, 1992[1798]). Around
100 years ago, the social sciences gradually
detached themselves from the humanities to
produce new forms of knowledge about, and
more professionals to administer, increasingly
complex modern societies. About 50 years ago,
an interdisciplinary field of research began to
take shape in response to the greatly increased
role, not least, of print and broadcast mass
communication in society, drawing on concepts
and methods from both the humanities and the
social sciences and, to a degree, natural sciences.

With the rise of new, digital media in recent

decades the internet and mobile media and
the ongoing digitalization of the old media, the
field is more central to political, economic, and
cultural developments than ever before, while
still struggling to understand what comes after
mass communication.
Throughout its brief history, media and
communication research has remained a site
of divides and, occasionally, conflicts among
the faculties. Most research traditions will
subscribe to summary descriptions of key ideas
such as information, communication, and
action. Media are vehicles of information they
make representations of and insights into reality
available, as articulated in text, image, and
sound. Media are channels of communication
they make information accessible to
communicators, and communicators to each
other. And, media are means of action
communication is performative, as it unfolds,
and as it ends. Most researchers will agree in
principle that apartheid is counterproductive to
the production of new knowledge about each
history of media and communication research
Chapter 19, p. 355

neither
apartheid nor
imperialism

media of three
degrees

K. B. Jensen
of these aspects of media and communication
the difficulty is how, in practice, to avoid
imperialism (Jensen, 1995: 141145). In a
future perspective, one test of the maturity and
viability of the field is whether it will be able
to close, or bridge, persistent divides between
different research traditions, and between
mass and interpersonal communication as
examined in previous theory, methodology,
and empirical work (Rogers, 1999).
In its second edition, the Handbook takes the
ongoing reconfiguration of mass, interpersonal,
and networked communication, and of the
media environment at large, as an occasion to
review and assess the state of convergence in
the field of research specifically between and
across social sciences and humanities which
has been recognized and debated at least since
the self-consciously titled Ferment in the Field
issue of the Journal of Communication (1983).
Media convergence is no sweeping process
of merging previously distinct technologies,
institutions,
and
discourses
seamlessly
into shared platforms and similar formats.
Theoretical and methodological convergence,
equally, is a complex and often conflicted
process. The aim of the Handbook is to provide
an updated, diverse, and in-depth resource in
order to advance academic convergence, so
that readers, researchers, and practitioners
may contribute to a more robust and relevant
understanding of media convergence (K. B.
Jensen, 2010). It is a practical resource in so far
as, in a practical discipline of communication,
theory is designed to provide conceptual
resources for reflecting on communication
problems (Craig, 1999: 130).
This introductory chapter presents a
framework for the rest of the Handbook,
with three main elements. First, I distinguish
between media of three different degrees: the
human body enabling communication face-toface; the technically reproduced means of mass
communication; and the digital technologies
facilitating networked interaction one-to-one,
one-to-many, as well as many-to-many. Like
the mass-interpersonal divide, the online-offline
dichotomy has become increasingly unhelpful
in the attempt to conceptualize and study
contemporary communications.

Second, I review the main variants of those

communication models which, explicitly or
implicitly, continue to inform undergraduate
textbooks as well as cutting-edge theory
development. The review is structured around
distinctive conceptions of the key ideas of information, communication, and action in various
humanistic, social-scientific, and natural-scientific contributions to the field.
Third, I characterize media as a special kind
of institutions institutions-to-think-with
that enable societies to reflect on and negotiate
their common existence. Communication
solidifies as culture; it lends meaning to human
actions and social structures over time. To place
the present media environment in historical
perspective, I return to Jrgen Habermas
model of the public sphere, and note how
new forms of political, economic, and cultural
action, facilitated by shifting media forms, can
be seen to push at the boundaries of the classic
public-sphere model.

Media of three degrees

Determination in the first instance
The media of communication occupy a middle
ground between material and immaterial reality.
Printed pages, celluloid strips, electromagnetic
signals, and bit streams are all material
phenomena. At the same time, different material
media provide access to a wide variety of actual,
possible, and barely imaginable worlds. Being
programmable in distinctive ways, digital media
have invited more or less radical claims that the
boundaries between material and immaterial
reality might be shifting in fundamental ways.
Research addressing such boundaries ranges
from the largely failed attempts since the 1950s
to program a general sort of artificial intelligence
(for an overview, see Boden, 1996; Partridge,
1991), via an early mainstream of new-media
studies embracing cyberspaces, cybercultures,
and cybersocieties (Bell and Kennedy, 2000;
Benedikt, 1991; Jones, 1998), to cultural criticism
projecting a cyborg future and a posthuman era
of life (Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 1999).
the public sphere, p. 17

Information,
communication,
action

institutions-tothink-with

Introduction

Resource box 1.1General reference works and journals

ENCYCLOPEDIA

International Encyclopedia of Communication the largest available resource on media and communication
research, including theoretical, historical, methodological, and culturally comparative perspectives. A twelvevolume publication (Donsbach, 2008), and an online reference work subject to continuous updating, www.
communicationencyclopedia.com

ABSTRACTS

Communication Abstracts abstracts and keywords of current research in media and communication
studies
Web of Science a broader and interdisciplinary resource covering diverse journals and conference
proceedings

HISTORIES

Briggs and Burke, 2010 an overview of media from the printing press to the internet
Winston, 1998 an account of electronic media since the telegraph, emphasizing differences between their
technological potentials and their actual social uses
Peters, 1999 a history of the very idea of communication, with important implications both for the general
history of ideas and for current media studies

HANDBOOKS AND TEXTBOOKS

McQuail, 2010 a standard introduction to positions in the field, with a relative emphasis on social-scientific
traditions
Lindlof and Taylor, 2011 an overview of qualitative research methods, including some of their theoretical
and philosophical sources
Berger, et al., 2009 a handbook summarizing work that approaches communication studies as a science

JOURNALS

matter
matters

Journal of Communication since the mid-1970s a flagship journal in the field, accommodating both quantitative
and qualitative, administrative and critical work
Communication Theory another key journal contributing to theory development about technologically
mediated as well as face-to-face communication
Critical Studies in Media and Communication and Media, Culture & Society two representatives of critical and
interpretive strands of media and communication research
Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly two
representatives of mainstream and quantitative research traditions
Cinema Journal and Screen two journals focusing on film (and television) as art forms and cultural practices,
with implications for the wider field
New Media and Society a central journal addressing new, digital media.

Matter matters. Despite the extraordinary

flexibility of digital technologies, they lend
themselves, like any tool or technology, to
certain social uses, and not others. It seems
necessary to reemphasize this premise, because

some media and communication research, in

recent decades, has shied away from issues of
determination, perhaps partly to distance itself
from early and still popular notions of strong
and direct effects, partly under the influence of

K. B. Jensen

Resource box 1.2Selected studies and reference works for individual

media
Books

Vincent, 2000 an overview of the development of literacy in modern Europe, with reference to books and
other media of communication
Radway, 1984 an exemplary study of romance novels as institutions, texts, and everyday resources

Newspapers

Habermas, 1989[1962] still an essential resource regarding the historical development and contemporary
functions of the press
Schudson, 1978 a social history of the US press, complementing the European focus of Habermas
Hallin and Mancini, 2004 a comparative approach to the press and media systems in the western hemisphere
(for other culturally comparative perspectives, see Chapter 11, this volume)

Film

Andrew, 1976 an introduction to classic film theories

Braudy and Cohen, 2004 an anthology of key texts in film studies

Radio

Crisell, 2008 a three-volume collection of classic and contemporary writings

Scannell and Cardiff, 1991 an exemplary social history of radio, with implications for other media

Television

Williams, 1974 the seminal study that defined television (and radio) in terms of their characteristics of
flow
Newcomb, 2004 a four-volume encyclopedia and reference work on television as an institution and a
cultural form

Digital and mobile media

Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2009 a four-volume collection of key texts addressing new media as
technologies, institutions, and discourses
Perron and Wolf, 2008; Salen and Zimmerman, 2004 two volumes covering games as technologies and
cultural practices
Ling and Donner, 2009 an overview of mobile communication in everyday life
Castells, et al., 2007 a comprehensive review of mobile media in a global and cross-cultural perspective

an underspecified constructionism across

the social and human sciences (for a critical
discussion, see Hacking, 1999).
A reformulation of the question of determination was suggested by one of the founders
of cultural studies, Stuart Hall (1983), who
introduced a distinction between determination
constructionism Chapter 3, p. 51
cultural studies Chapter 2, p. 46

in the final instance and determination in the

first instance. In a reappraisal of Marxism,
he questioned a tendency for a great deal
of critical theory to take for granted that,
ultimately, it is the economic bases of society
that determine how humans live their lives
and make their history. When all is said and
done, money talks. Reversing this analytical
perspective, Hall recognized how prevailing

Introduction

overdetermination

affordances
text
messaging
(sms)

economic and other material conditions

establish outer limits to human agency and
social interaction, but underscored the relative
indetermination and variability of how, for
example, technological inventions are put
to particular social uses. Technologies have
unforeseen, even unforeseeable consequences.
(A comparable conception of determination
as a layered process with multiple causal agents
was termed overdetermination by Sigmund
Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud,
1911[1899]). He noted how the events of an
ordinary day will mix with long gone and
perhaps repressed experiences in the content as
well as in the form of ones dreams. Transferring
Freuds terminology to critical social theory,
Louis Althusser (1977[1965]) questioned the
economic determinism of traditional Marxism,
and underscored the relative autonomy of
political and cultural practices in shaping social
developments.)
Technologies have affordances (Gibson,
1979; Hutchby, 2001), or potentials that must
be actualized. To illustrate, text messages (sms)
have been a key factor in the diffusion of mobile
telephony around the world over the past decade
(Castells, et al., 2007). This is in spite of the
fact that such messages were initially thought
of as a way for service providers to contact
customers, or to offer specialized services, not
as communication between subscribers. Neither
the technical potential (which had to be realized
and refined) nor the general profit motive (which
is a given in market economies) will explain the
current prominence of text messaging the first
killer application of mobile communication. The
social practice of texting was technologically
(and economically) determined, but only in the
first instance.
The material conditions of communication
are, evidently, outside the control of any
individual human being. The perceptual,
cognitive, and interactive capacities of my body,
while cultivated through socialization and
education, are the limits of my communications.
Although we commonly say that we have a body,
we also are a body; my body is my general
medium for having a world (Merleau-Ponty,
1962[1945]: 146). The extensions of human
capacities into diverse technologies (McLuhan,

1964) are collective accomplishments that

circumscribe and embed the individual as
second nature, as elaborated by the tradition of
medium theory.

Bodies and tools the first degree

In the perspective of the history and theory
of communication, human beings can be
understood as media. The human body is a
versatile material platform, hosting speech,
song, dance, drama, painting, and creative
arts generally capacities that are cultivated
into competences by children as well as
professional artists. In itself, the human body is
a necessary and sufficient material condition of
communication; our bodies become productive
and receptive media of communication through
socialization and acculturation. In comparison,
tools writing utensils or musical instruments
are neither necessary nor sufficient, but
extend the human body and its communicative
capacities in significant ways. Media of the first
degree human bodies and their extensions in
tools externalize accounts of actual as well
as possible worlds, and enable each of us to
communicate with others about such worlds for
both reflective and instrumental purposes.
Embodied communication is perhaps most
commonly associated with speech and oral
interaction. The everyday conversations that join
family and friends, neighbors and coworkers,
into groups and communities are key to all social
life. Face-to-face interaction, however, comprises
diverse modalities of expression. We encounter
other people as audiovisual media and in
multimodal communication. And, our tools and
artifacts create more or less durable mediascapes
(Appadurai, 1996). One historical example is socalled rough music, as studied by the historian
E. P. Thompson (1991: 467538) in eighteenthand nineteenth-century England, which had
parallels in other European countries and in the
US. If an individual or a family had offended the
rest of a community, it was a common practice
to name and shame them by chanting, shouting
obscenities, and banging pots and pans. And,
medium theory Chapter 2, p. 24
possible worlds, p. 14

human body
as necessary
and sufficient
condition of
communication

humans as
audiovisual
media

K. B. Jensen

language as
privileged
modality

orality
primary,
secondary,
tertiary

writing

rough music is not entirely a thing of the past:

On March 11, 2005, BBC World News reported
that authorities in Andhra Pradesh, India, had
sent groups of drummers to tax evaders houses
to make them pay up (BBC, 2005).
Verbal language, nevertheless, constitutes a
privileged modality in evolutionary, psychological, and social terms. Language relays categorical information that can be recategorized
restated, responded to, reprogrammed in
ways that no other modality can. As noted by
the linguist, mile Benveniste (1985[1969]:
236), the signs of society can be interpreted
integrally by those of language, but the reverse
is not so. Speech interprets images, but images
rarely interpret speech, except in the occasional
aesthetic experiment.
For most of human history, of course,
bards or singers of tales were the only media
around singular and localized archives of
information and means of communicating a
cultural heritage. The literature on non-literate,
prehistoric societies describes oral cultures as
context-bound and present-oriented (Goody
and Watt, 1963; Ong, 1982; Scribner and
Cole, 1981). Far from labeling these as inferior,
medium theory does suggest that primary orality
a state of culture that is totally untouched
by any knowledge of writing or print (Ong,
1982: 11) is incompatible with a sense of a
historical past, and of a different future. (This
is in contrast to a secondary orality, which Ong
(1982: 11) associated with the spoken word of
broadcasting, and a tertiary orality that may be
emerging with digital media.) In a primary oral
culture, communication is an expression and an
event in context, rather than a representation
and a resource across contexts.
In a comparative perspective, I include
writing with media of the first degree. To be
sure, manuscripts supported vast and complex
economic, social, and scientific systems for
millennia, by fixating information as knowledge
and facilitating the reflective production of
ever more knowledge. As constituents of
communicative practices, however, manuscripts
depend on multi-step flows of social interaction.
Because copies are precious and few, they will be
distributed in an extremely selective fashion to
central individuals within established institutions.

Such individuals priests, generals, literate

servants, etc. will pass on even more selective
and contextually adapted information with oral
commentary within dedicated organizational
hierarchies. The point is not only that social
hierarchies may restrict public access to
information (and to the literacy required) which
has notoriously been the case throughout history.
Nor is it merely that the copying of manuscripts is
laborious and subject to error, which limits access
to precise and applicable information. Rather,
in a scribal culture, communication remains an
expression and an event that is primarily enacted
in local contexts by embodied individuals.
Even a utopian state that would encourage and
financially support the literacy of its people, and
their copying of as many manuscripts as possible
for as wide a group of other readers as possible,
would require sheer human labor on a scale that
makes anything approaching equal access to the
culturally available information inconceivable.
Mass communication is not a potential of the
medium of writing.
In unsentimental terms, Joshua Meyrowitz
(1994: 54) noted that the comparatively inefficient forms of reproducing and distributing
writing made it a transitional cultural form.
Writing by hand, of course, remains as a
major cultural practice. Writing is integral to
upbringing and education; to much drafting of
texts in political life, business administration,
and scholarship; and to communication with
ones intimates and, importantly, oneself
through notes. In news studies, reference is
sometimes made to source media (Ericson
et al., 1987: 41) oral interviews, scribbled
notes, printed press releases, etc. all of which
feed into what is reported as news in media of
the second and now third degrees. As media
of record, however, and of interaction within
and between the main institutions of society,
however, embodied individuals and written
texts were superseded by a second degree of
media.

Technologies the second degree

Until quite recently, it was still common to refer
to the mass media media that distribute the
same, or similar, messages from a few central

the mass
media

Introduction

technical
reproduction
of communication

aura

senders to many distributed receivers. The

philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1977[1936]),
famously defined mass media in terms of their
technical reproduction and dissemination,
specifically of artworks, but with implications
for other communicative practices, as well.
Whereas Benjamin focused on photography,
film, and radio, I take media of the second degree
to include the various analog technologies
from printed books and newspapers to film,
radio, and television all of which took shape
as one-to-many media institutions and practices
of communication. Their common features
were, first, one-to-one reproduction, storage,
and presentation of a particular content; and
second, media of the second degree radically
extended the potential for dissemination of and
access to information across space and time,
irrespective of the presence and number of
participants.
Benjamin noted a specific ambiguity that
arises from reproduction. On the one hand, it
results in the loss of what he termed aura: the
sense of uniqueness and, perhaps, transcendence
that has traditionally been associated with fine
arts paintings or sculptures, for instance and
with actors or musical performers appearing
on stage. Present artifacts and singular actors
mediate an absent reality, and thus appear larger
than life. (Also other human beings anyone
could be said to carry an aura, as informed by
their biographies and shared histories, and as
appreciated by intimates, friends, and strangers
in a chance meeting. This, however, was not
Benjamins original point.)
On the other hand, technical reproduction
represented a major civilizational advance.
When artworks and other cultural products
are divorced from their unique, but local
origins, they afford many more uses by many
more people. Reproduction entails a shift of
emphasis in the understanding of art, from
singular expression to social communication.
Accordingly, Benjamin (1977[1936]: 390)
concluded, art need no longer be subordinated
to religious and other ritual uses:
[] for the first time in world history,
mechanical reproduction emancipates the
work of art from its parasitical dependence

on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work

of art reproduced becomes the work of art
designed for reproducibility. [] the total
function of art is reversed. Instead of being
based on ritual, it begins to be based on
another practice politics.
Designed for reproducibility: reproduction
is not an incidental, but a planned activity
with social implications. Two classic examples
books and newspapers suggest the point.
Books, pamphlets, and other printed formats
could be considered a necessary (though far
from sufficient) condition of Renaissance and
Reformation (Eisenstein, 1979). Newspapers,
in turn, served as material vehicles in
political revolutions and in the formation of
nation-states (Anderson, 1991; Habermas,
1989[1962]). Print media were at once
impersonal and public, potentially outside the
reach of the auratic leaders of religious and
political establishments. The printing press,
thus, facilitated the modern understanding of
religion as a personal matter, and of politics as
a public matter.
Compared to the printing press, technologies
for recording and disseminating sound came
late to media history, from the 1870s onwards
(for overview, see Millard, 1995). For the first
time in human history, sound events from song
and other musical performances, to political
speeches, to natural environments could
be preserved as part of the cultural heritage.
Sound became constitutive of the central
mass media of the twentieth century: radio,
film (from 1929), and television. Moreover,
analog sound technologies contributed to
new kinds of soundscapes (Schafer, 1977), in
private and in public. In shops as well as in
workplaces, an important and underresearched
ingredient of urban life has been muzak (see,
e.g., Barnes, 1988; Lanza, 1994). In the home,
radio broadcasts and recorded music came to
compete, in different social groups, with piano
recitals and community singing. With several
radio, television, and stereo sets per household,
private listening increasingly equaled personal
listening. From the 1960s, the transistor radio
made music, news, and other genres accessible
on the move.

religion as
personal
matter, politics
as public matter
sound
recording

soundscapes

letter writing

K. B. Jensen
It should be noted that multi-step communication remained the order of the day in print
and electronic cultures. For one thing, access
to printed materials in different historical and
cultural settings has remained severely limited
by the economic means of potential readers, low
literacy levels, and living conditions generally. For
another thing, reading as a communal activity
reading aloud has remained a significant
cultural practice (Boyarin, 1992). In a critique
and redevelopment of Eisensteins (1979) classic
study of the role of printing presses and books in
the Reformation, Pettegree (2005) showed how
both processes of reading and of converting to a
new faith were public activities involving singing,
preaching, drama, and visual images, as well.
Furthermore, readers themselves became writers,
adding comments or marginalia (Jackson,
2001), perhaps alongside those of others already
appearing in book margins (anticipating user
tags in digital media), and taking notes for later
inclusion in letters. And, in the case of broadcast
audiences, the new reception studies from the
1980s documented how audiences, in addition to
actively interpreting media content, collectively
engage media as part of their communicative
practices in context (Lull, 1980; Morley, 1986;
Radway, 1984). Whereas face-to-face and mass
communicative practices, thus, have long been
intertwined, digital media have lent new material
forms to their links and networks.

Meta-technologies the third degree

meta-media

The digital computer reproduces and recombines

all previous media of representation and
interaction on a single material platform of
hardware and software. At the beginning of the
era of personal computers, Kay and Goldberg
(1999[1977]), accordingly, described computers
as meta-media. As means of expression, digital
media join text, image, and sound in some
new and many old genres, as inherited from
mass media as well as face-to-face interaction:
narratives, debates, games, etc. As modes of
interaction, digital media integrate one-toone, one-to-many, and many-to-many forms of

communication. The central example of media of

the third degree remains the networked personal
computer. At the same time, mobile telephones
and other portable devices are becoming equally
important access points to the internet, and
already account for much of the diffusion of
the internet in some parts of the world, notably
South-East Asia and Japan (Castells, et al., 2007).
With meta-technologies, communication
has come full circle to the sort of interactive
and multimodal forms of interchange that
characterize face-to-face settings. With mobile
phones, technologically mediated speech has
become a much more prominent component
of everyday life in the coordination of public
as well as private affairs. Online computer
games, further, exemplify the integration of
different auditory and visual modalities, not just
in the representation of a game world, but in
the coordination of the gameplay, for instance,
through continuous spoken interaction between
multiple players (Jrgensen, 2009). And, the sense
of being virtually present in some literally absent
world may translate into a sense of engagement
with public events and issues. One example is
the Sonic Memorial project that commemorates
the events of September 11, 2001. In addition
to presenting sounds from the neighborhood
around the World Trade Center, the site includes
interactive functionalities so that visitors may
themselves add a sound (Sonic Memorial
Project, 20022006; Cohen and Willis, 2004).
Digital technologies in general, and the internet
in particular, invite research to refocus studies
from media to communication, and to clarify
the relationship between the two categories. One
material medium may support several different
communicative practices; some communicative
practices travel well between media; and certain
familiar practices come back in style when new
platforms become available, as illustrated by
writing via text messaging (sms).

A fourth degree
For some time, another generation of digital
media beyond a Web 1.0 of homepages, banner

user tags, Chapter 10, p. 195

computer games Chapter 7, p. 145

qualitative reception studies, Chapter 9

text messaging(sms), p. 5

media and/vs.
communication

Introduction
advertisements, and directories; also beyond a
Web 2.0 of social network sites, sponsored links,
and tags has been referred to in terms of their
ubiquity and pervasiveness (for an overview,
see Greenfield, 2006; Lyytinen and Yoo, 2002).
Information technologies everywhere, in
everything, and for everybody have been the
commercial and policy buzzwords. While the
preferred terminologies still vary, a common
assumption is that future digital media will
become categorically different from their
current form of work stations, laptops, and
mobile devices:
Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a
post-desktop model of human-computer
interaction [] in which information
processing has been thoroughly integrated
into everyday objects and activities. As
opposed to the desktop paradigm, in
which a single user consciously engages a
single device for a specialized purpose. In
the course of ordinary activities, someone
using ubiquitous computing engages
many computational devices and systems
simultaneously, and may not necessarily even
be aware that they are doing so.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_
computing, accessed June 5, 2009)

ubiquitous
computing

virtual reality

the world as a
medium

organic user
interfaces

The originator of the idea of ubiquitous

computing, Mark Weiser (1991), contrasted
ubiquity with virtuality. Early versions of
virtual media environments during the 1980sand 1990s were based on a model of the world
in a medium one local, stationary, and multimodal interface, including goggles, gloves,
and a treadmill that enabled the user to enter
a separate, virtual reality (for an overview, see
Levy, 1993). In contrast, ubiquitous computing
embeds multiple media interfaces in diverse
natural objects, artifacts, and social settings
the world as a medium. The development
has also been referred to as the coming of the
internet of things (ITU, 2005). Compared to
the graphic user interfaces that helped to make
the computer a popular medium, research
has begun to refer to organic user interfaces
(Vertegaal and Poupyrev, 2008). Here, the basic
metaphor of the interface shifts from one of a

tool to one of skin or membranes (Rekimoto,

2008: 40). Simultaneously, hardware systems
are moving beyond silicon (Munakata, 2007)
toward even more miniaturized and physically
integrated bases of computing, for instance, at
the chemical and atomic levels. At the intersection of hardware and humans, life support
systems and implants are examples of media
as body parts. At the very least, digital media
enable significantly more location-dependent
and personalized communication; ubiquitous
access to other communicators in image, text, as
well as sound; and more actions at a distance, in
a physical as well as a social sense, in ways that
are still waiting to be imagined and realized.
In a future perspective, mobile, ubiquitous,
and pervasive media may require yet another
reassessment of the relationship between
material and virtual worlds (D. Williams, 2010)
of the very ideas of media and communication. In what sense do humans communicate with digitized artifacts and with the rest
of material reality, for instance, through the
Global Positioning System (GPS) and other
Geographical Information Systems (GIS)?
Cognitive science has described the bandwidth
of human cognition and communication with
reference to so-called basic-level categories
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), whose yardstick is
the human body. We have, and are, a particular
neurophysiological structure that taps into
certain levels of reality, and not others. We have
access to things that are about our size and
within the reach of our senses: luminous surfaces
and loud music, but not infrared radiation or
the echoes of the Big Bang (although digital
technologies can transform the Big Bang to our
bandwidth, (Whittle, 19962000)). Basic-level
categories enable humans to think and speak
about what is up and down, in and out, before
and after, both literally and metaphorically in
terms of who is up or down in a society, in or
out as far as a subculture is concerned, first or
second in a sports competition or an online
auction. The metaphors we live by (Lakoff
and Johnson, 1980), while determined in the
first instance by the human body, are extended
in tools, technologies, and meta-technologies.
Media developments continuously challenge the
field to consider its founding concepts.

beyond
silicon

basic-level
categories

10

K. B. Jensen
information, communication, and
action
Common linguistic habits render information
as an attribute of messages or data, or as
the purpose of human communication as
if information were an objective entity that
could be carried from one place to another,
purchased, or owned. This conception is
seriously misleading.
(Krippendorff, 2008b: 2213)
And yet, it is a commonsensical conception of
the content of communication that underlies
the most diverse kinds of research. Also research
traditions that prefer to speak of content in
terms of its meaning have tended to approach
the object of study in essentialist terms,
asking: Where is meaning? In which material
units, discursive structures, mental states, or
behavioral events does meaning reside? By
considering a different question When is
meaning? (K. B. Jensen, 1991) studies may
recognize the categorically different forms in
which information and communication manifest
themselves in multiple stages and contexts of
human cognition and social interaction.
The authors of communication models have
mostly agreed on the constituents, but have
disagreed, often fundamentally, about their
status and interrelations (McQuail and Windahl,
1993). Figure 1.1 lays out the basic constituents
of communication, as presented in a humanistic
perspective (adapted from Jakobson, 1960),
italicizing two elements that have tended to
be conceived differently in humanistic, socialscientific, and natural-scientific or engineering
models. First, models differ regarding the role
and importance of codes of communication,
i.e., registers of signs and symbols, beyond
physical contacts and signals. Second, the
context of communication has been approached
variously as a con-text, in a literal sense, that
is always already discursive, or as the social
circumstances of communication, broadly
speaking, its material as well as institutional
conditions.

Jakobsons communication model Chapter 10, p. 197

Context
Addresser

Message

Addressee

Contact
Code
Figure 1.1 Constituents of communication (adapted from Jakobson,
1960)

Not surprisingly, different faculties have

defined communication in terms of their
specific domain of reality physical signals
(Shannon and Weaver, 1949), discursive
codes (Jakobson, 1960), or social practices
(Lasswell, 1948). Realizing the complexity
of human communication, analysts have
introduced metaphors or analogies to link
reality domains and academic faculties.
One illustration is Warren Weavers classic
commentary on Claude E. Shannons (1948)
information theory. In it, Weaver cautioned
that information must not be confused with
meaning (Shannon and Weaver, 1949: 8),
and that technical, semantic, and effectiveness
problems of communication should be treated
as separate issues. Toward the end of the
commentary, nevertheless, he envisioned a
general theory of communication that will
surely have to take into account not only the
capacity of the channel, but also (even the
words are right!) the capacity of the audience
(p. 27). Whether or not these are the right
words, is precisely the question.

Information into meaning

Since Warren Weavers admonition to communication researchers not to confuse information
and meaning, the field has been at work to
spell out the relationship between the two
concepts. In a sense, the whole of meaning is
more than the sum of information. The more
analytical question has been how to define and
parse the elements of communication. What
are the degrees of freedom that apply to the
selection and combination of these elements in
remarkably flexible, yet distinctively patterned
ways?

the whole of
meaning is
more than
the sum of
information

Introduction

Predefined inventory of units/events

+

Deterministic

Generative

Stochastic

Indeterministic

+
Predefined
structure
configuring
units/events
Figure 1.2 Four models of meaning

products and
processes of
communication

In Figure 1.2 (K. B. Jensen, 1995: 50),

I identify four ideal-typical conceptions of
meaning. The figure compares different ways of
operationalizing what most research traditions
consider as the messages, contents, or texts
of communication. On the one hand, the
constituents of meaning may, or may not, be
understood as a predefined or fixed inventory.
(I refer to the constituents as units and/or
events in order to allow for different emphases
on either the products or the processes of
communication.) On the other hand, the
combinatorial structures may, or may not, be
assumed to make up a predefined or fixed range
of message types narratives, arguments, and
other generic formats.
At one end of the spectrum, a deterministic
model assumes that the outcome of
predefined inventories and structures is a
law-like configuration of what can be thought
and said by humans. Few researchers will
advocate a strong version of this position;
communication represents a measure of
indetermination in human experience and
social interaction. Nevertheless, research
traditions, to varying degrees, have noted how
biological and technological circumstances
precondition communication. At a biological
level, physical and mental capacities make up
enabling as well as constraining conditions
of human cognition and communication
(Cappella, 1996). At a technological level,
different media extend human capacities, but

in biased ways (Innis, 1951), facilitating

some forms of expression and experience
above others.
At the other end of the spectrum that is
suggested by Figure 1.2, an indeterministic
model implies that there are, in effect, no
boundaries to what might be thought or said.
A strong version of the position is found in poststructuralism, which holds that the differential
structures of information will forever undermine
any closure around particular meanings. Some
accounts of interpretive communities (Fish,
1979), similarly, have suggested that texts
are essentially empty and open to individual
and situated projections of meanings. More
moderately, institutional senders (artists, film
directors, popular composers, etc.) can be
seen to selectively realize cultural tradition,
as inflected through their own biography and
historical context, just as individual receivers
actualize more or less unique meanings in their
personal encounters with media.
The other two ideal-types of meaning are
representative of the two mainstreams of the
current field of media and communication
research, namely, quantitative variants of social
science and qualitative forms of humanistic
scholarship. The stochastic type, prominent in
social-scientific methodologies, is typified by
quantitative content analysis: the objective,
systematic, and quantitative description of the
manifest content of communication (Berelson,
1952: 18). The analytical procedure serves to
establish the probability distributions of certain
communicative vehicles or content units words,
propositions, images, evaluative statements, etc.
within a sample of messages. Given, first, a
predefined range of content units and, second,
a set of analytical categories for coding them,
the immediate research question is how this
multitude of elements enters into differential
and relational structures. The more interesting
implication is that such configurations within
radio newscasts, television series, or chat
sequences carry worldviews: their constituents
biases of communication Chapter 12, p. 224
poststructuralism Chapter 2, p. 42
interpretive communities, Chapter 9, p. 183
content analysis Chapter 13, p. 248

11

12

K. B. Jensen

deep and
surface
structures

are selective, and their combinations tell

certain stories rather than others. A main
contribution of the content-analytical tradition
(Krippendorff, 2004) has been to keep a tab
on representations of reality in the media,
documenting and questioning the most widely
accessible forms of information about public
events and issues.
The generative model of meaning, finally,
grows out of the humanities, and is characteristic of qualitative studies of media and
other texts and discourses. Literary theory
and aesthetics since Russian formalism of the
early twentieth century (Erlich, 1955), and
linguistics since the rise of transformational
grammar (Chomsky, 1965), share the insight
that a relatively few deep structures generate
an immense, even infinite variety of surface
structures in the case of both single sentences
and stories the length of books or feature
films. As predefined matrices, deep structures
are at once very general and highly adaptable.
Accordingly, they yield many variations, for
instance, of bedtime stories or advertisements,
whose basic themes and structures might
otherwise be considered identical. They keep
the attention of children and consumers, not
because either group is immature or gullible,
but because that is the structure of meaningful
information.
To sum up, each ideal-type of message or
discourse analysis taps certain aspects of information and meaning they are all necessary
contributions to a diverse and applicable field of
media and communication research. University
teachers regularly remind their students that the
how of research depends on the what and the
why: the appropriate methods of data collection
and analysis depend on the given domain and
issue of empirical inquiry. It is only by recognizing the full range of potentially meaningful
structures of media that research may analyze
and assess their uses and consequences.

Communication between transmission and

ritual
The foundational question of the field has been:
Who / Says What / In Which Channel / To
Whom / With What Effect? (Lasswell, 1948).

The question might have been: who shares what

with whom, in which processes of interaction?
The root sense of communication is to share,
and to make common (Peters, 2008). Implicit
in these different formulations are two models
of communication that have been treated as
antithetical for more than thirty years.
The distinction between a transmission
model and a ritual model of communication
was foregrounded by James W. Carey in a
1975 benchmark article (Carey, 1989b[1975]).
According to Carey, the US mainstream of
social-scientific media studies had taken as
its premise a transmission model emphasizing
the transfer of information from senders to
receivers within a centralized system of mass
communication. The backdrop was the pivotal
role of information and communication, and
of related research activities, in an emerging
social infrastructure that depended on new
means of regulating itself through intensified
surveillance and registration: the control
society (Beniger, 1986). The functional or
dysfunctional impact of media on individuals,
their attitudes and behaviors, was placed
high on the research agenda: mass-mediated
violence and propaganda were feared;
advertising, for the most part, favored. One
implication of the transmission model seemed
to be that the media are mechanisms which are
somehow separate from society means for
either positive or negative ends. Media may
have effects, or they may not.
Careys ritual model, in contrast, suggested
that media necessarily have effects: communication is a sharing of meaning and a condition of
community. Rituals are never empty. Returning
to pragmatism, Carey quoted the pragmatist
philosopher, John Dewey: Society exists not
only by transmission, by communication, but
it may fairly be said to exist in transmission,
in communication (Carey, 1989b[1975]:
13f.). Communication, accordingly, should be
considered a constitutive ingredient of, and a
mediating factor between, human agency and
social structure: a symbolic process whereby
reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and
transformed (p. 23). While Careys work
the control society Chapter 3, p. 49

transmission
model vs.
ritual model

13

Introduction

media as
cultural
forum

communicators as
open-ended
sources of
information

has been most influential in the US, his ritual

model resonates with much European humanistic media scholarship on texts as the concrete
vehicles of social and cultural ritual. In a redevelopment of the ritual perspective, Newcomb
and Hirsch (1983) suggested a cultural forum
model of communication. The most popular
and widely accessible media in a culture, represented in their article by television, could be
understood as a forum in the classic sense of an
arena for articulating and negotiating common
concerns: in popular culture generally, in television specifically, the raising of questions is as
important as the answering of them (p. 63).
(On the internet as a cultural forum, see Jensen
and Helles, 2011.) Still, an important issue is
who gets to deliberate on the answers, and how:
who is in a position to transmit what to whom
in the course of the ritual process of the forum?
Whereas it is easy, as always, to exaggerate
the extent to which new technologies may change
old practices of communication, digital media
suggest a new perspective on the concepts of
transmission and ritual. Like other media, they
make information accessible to people, and
people accessible to information providers. In
advertising jargon, both television audiences
and internet users are attractive to commercial
and political interests as eyeballs. Unlike earlier
media, network media allow a critical mass of
people to become senders to both raise and
answer questions, one-on-one and collectively,
synchronously as well as asynchronously,
introducing new forms of interpretation and
interaction, as they become eyeballs for one
another. On the internet, social actors themselves
constitute open-ended sources of information, or
dynamic databases of sorts. Digital technologies
make information available and accessible
on a different order of magnitude and in new
structures of transmission and ritual for better
or worse.
Societies exist by transmission as well as in
ritual. Whether pushed or pulled, information
is transmitted; ritual motivates transmissions.
One current task of communication theory is
to conceptualize the shifting configurations of
communicators and messages, and their mutual
accessibility in digital media. Interactivity with
media anticipates interactions between people.

Communication is a particular constellation of

interactivity and interaction.

Performativity and interactivity

Performing possible worlds
Compared to transmission and ritual, or
information and meaning, categories of human
and social action have been less central to
theory development in the field of media and
communication research. Action has, most
commonly, been understood as input to or
output from a process of communication. On
the input side, editorial decisions and legislative
frameworks condition what is communicated;
on the output side, communication feeds
discursive and physical behaviors. In order to
relate media and communication to the rest of
culture and society, it is useful to specify three
aspects of the general relationship between
communication and action.
First, all human actions can be considered
communications in their own right. They
may be intentional statements, or incidental
behaviors with which others associate meaning,
or they may belong to the considerable gray
area in between the two. At the intentional end
of the scale, the terrorist attacks on the United
States on September 11, 2001, were, in one
sense, acts of communication the loss of life
and the material destruction accomplished a
symbolic purpose. Toward the incidental end,
we continuously communicate with each other
through clothing and other visual appearances,
body sounds, and general conduct. Indeed, any
object, event, or action in the world might
be considered a medium of communication,
because humans are forever ascribing meaning
to their cultural as well as natural environments
(Ruesch and Bateson, 1987[1951]: 6). As one
student of Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick
(Watzlawick, et al., 1967: 49), put it, humans
cannot not communicate.
Second, all communication is as a form of
action; it occurs in a context and for a purpose.
Saying something means doing something. This
was the central insight of speech-act theory
(Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). Speaking to others
about the weather, or mutual acquaintances,
or recent events, is a way of maintaining and

action as
communication

humans
cannot not
communicate
communication as
action

14

K. B. Jensen

communication
anticipates
action

possible
worlds

Worlds
1, 2, and 3

modifying social relations. This performative

conception of language has influenced current
human and social sciences profoundly. They
stand on the shoulders of the philosopher, Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1953), who came to understand
language, not as a mirror image of reality, but
as a set of language games or discourses that, in
Careys (1989b[1975]: 23) terminology, produce,
maintain, repair, and transform reality. Language
games are played for real and incessantly, and
they are inseparable from the life forms, or
social practices, that they serve to constitute.
In the classic pragmatist formulation, if men
define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences (Thomas and Thomas, 1928: 572).
Third, communication anticipates action.
Communication is a self-reflective, recursive
form of action: it addresses actions that
communicate and communications that enact.
Communication explores the relations between
what is, and what could be what has been
referred to, in several fields of study, as possible
worlds. Many different realities are conceivable,
as exemplified by science fiction and so-called
counterfactual historiography describing what
might have happened if key historical events had
taken a different turn (Hawthorn, 1991). Only
some of these realities, however, are possible in
either a material or a logical sense, as examined
by philosophical logic (Divers, 2002; Kripke,
1980) and literary theory (Ryan, 1991). For
communication theory, one particularly interesting account of such multiple realities came
from the philosopher and theorist of science,
Karl Popper, who counted three worlds. World 1
refers to the domain of physical objects or states;
World 2 is the world of consciousness, mental
states, or behavioral dispositions to act. Linking
such external and internal worlds, World
3 covers the world of the objective contents of
thought, whether scientific or poetic (Popper,
1972b: 106). As a communicative coin of
exchange, World 3 includes fictional, normative,
and other contestable accounts of reality in the
full range of media.
At the juncture of traditional philosophical
logic and modern technologies, the digital
computer refocused attention on time as
a conditioning factor of what comes to be
known in the first place. Propositional logic

can describe only states of being. Adding

time to it created algorithms procedural
steps that could describe processes of
becoming, which means that anything that
can be stated logically can be converted into
an algorithm and becomes, hence, computable
(Krippendorff, 2008a: 1156). By adding time to
logic, computing has served to produce not just
new quantities of information, but qualitatively
different ways of rendering and engaging reality,
for example, within atomic physics and genetics.
Current knowledge of subatomic reality and the
human genome and actions on both would
be inconceivable without digital computers.
Like an algorithm, human communication
is executed over time. Unlike algorithms,
communicative interactions are not generally
subject to a central perspective or procedure,
or a common logic. All the computers on the
grid of the internet cannot compute the pros
and cons of a possible design for the future
of the internet into a conclusion. The possible
worlds of communication emerge across
space, as well, and through the intervention of
distributed social actors through interactivity.
While often used as a buzzword, which some
researchers would prefer to discard altogether
(Aarseth, 2003), the concept of interactivity
helps to clarify the relationship between
communication and action, not just in the case
of digital media.
Interactivities
As currently associated with computing, the idea
of interactivity derives from the sociological
concept of interaction between subjects faceto-face, but also indirectly at various levels of
the social structure. Parliaments and stock
exchanges interact. Most basically, an analogy
is suggested between human-human and
human-machine exchanges. Originating in the
era of batch processing, when technical staff
could check the preliminary results of a run on
a mainframe computer and then modify it in
so-called interactive mode (J. F. Jensen, 1999:
168), interactivity has come to refer to the way
in which ordinary users operate computers in a
sequentially structured manner (for overview, see
Kiousis, 2002; McMillan, 2002). As imported
into media and communication research, the

logic + time =
computing

interactivity
and/vs.
interaction

Introduction
Agency

INTERACTIVITY 3
INTERACTIVITY 1

Structure

INTERACTIVITY 2

Medium

Figure 1.3 Three types of interactivity

terminology has been ambiguous: the field has

aimed to account both for peoples interactivity
with media and for their interaction with each
other through media. Communication is that
unique form of interaction by which human
actors negotiate their common social structure,
depending on the media at their disposal.
It is helpful to contextualize interactivity and
interaction with two other key concepts of social
theory: agency and structure (Giddens, 1984).
Figure 1.3 suggests the interdependence of medium,
agency, and structure: I treat the category
of medium as equal to agency and structure, a
constituent of all social interaction, including faceto-face as well as technologically mediated contact,
in a three-way configuration. The terminology of
Interactivity 1, 2, and 3 reemphasizes the interdependence of three constitutive dimensions of
social interaction and the communicative aspect
of each:
Interactivity 1 is what computer scientists
(and ordinary computer users) typically refer

to as interactivity: clicking on a web link,

entering a message into a chat service, or
shooting at the enemy in a computer game.
Here, interactivity amounts to sustained
selectivity from a preprogrammmed range
of options. It corresponds, in important
structural respects, to the turn-taking of
an ordinary conversation (Sacks, et al.,
1974). Mass media, as traditionally
understood, offer more limited interactivity
in this regard: selecting a radio station,
turning to the sports section of a newspaper,
and checking in advance whodunit on
the last page of a crime novel. All media,
however, require measures of navigation,
attention, and interpretation by users in
order to access the available information.
Interactivity 2, next, refers to the relationship
between media and other institutions within
the social structure. Depending on theoretical
perspective, and on the communicative genre in
question, media can be said to perform the role
of a watchdog or Fourth Estate (Cater, 1959)
vis--vis the powers that be. In a wider sense,
media constitute a cultural forum (Newcomb
and Hirsch, 1983) in which alternative social
systems and entirely other possible worlds may
be articulated. In a historical and cross-cultural
perspective, a central question is whether and
how basic technologies have been shaped into
media with such potentials.
Interactivity 3, finally, addresses the
relationship between the social structure
and its constituent actors and interests, from
the individual citizen to national political
establishments and global corporations.
The myriad actors that make up society
interact at a distance and over time; communication lends orientation and meaning
to the process, providing a sense of where
single actions might fit into a larger whole.
The classic example is citizens involvement
in political democracy, parties, and popular
movements through the media of the public
sphere. A recent example is telemedicine:
doctors interacting with, diagnosing, and
treating their patients in private, virtual
turn-taking, Chapter 7, p. 119

agency, structure, and medium Chapter 10, p. 200

the public sphere, p. 17

15

16

K. B. Jensen
consultations. The human body and the
body politic both depend on communication
to reproduce and modify themselves.

institutions-to-think-with

objects-tothink-with

anyone as
someone

the publicsphere model

As part of an anthropological perspective on how

the members of a culture communicate, Claude
Lvi-Strauss referred to objects-to-think-with.
Especially, animals that are part of the cultural
diet can become means of classifying and, thus,
coming to terms with reality. It is not so much that
they are good to eat, but that they are good to
think (with) (Lvi-Strauss, 1991[1962]: 89). In a
different culture, the same animal or natural object
may mean something else, it may be prepared in a
different manner, or it may not be considered good
to either eat or think with. Also artifacts from
stone tools to oil paintings serve as more or less
programmable tokens of meaningful interchange.
In comparison, contemporary media constitute
institutions-to-think-with (Douglas, 1987)
highly differentiated and widely distributed
material and modal infrastructures that enable
reflection and interaction across space and time.
Cultures and societies program their media,
which, in turn, program them.
Media are a distinctive kind of institution-tothink-with. Compared to other institutions of
analysis and reflection sciences, arts, or religions
media are, in a positive sense, the lowest common
denominators of culture and society. They do not
require specialized skills or talents of a scientific
or artistic nature for interaction and deliberation
to occur. Nor do they presuppose the existence
of transcendent possible worlds to which only
certain privileged texts, individuals, or procedures
provide access. Media address and involve anyone
as someone (Scannell, 2000) in communication
about the ends and means of society, increasingly
across time and space.
Habermas public-sphere model (Figure
1.4) continues to offer a valuable framework
in which to examine the relationship between
media and other social institutions as part
of a system of interconnected, yet relatively
autonomous spheres (for review and discussion,
see Calhoun, 1992; Mortensen, 1977; Negt and
Kluge, 1993[1972]). The figure notes, to the
right, the state agencies that establish and enforce

the material, legal, and other infrastructural

conditions of social interaction, ultimately with
recourse to their monopoly on the use of physical
force. To the left, private economic enterprise
unfolds in the social sphere, while the intimate
sphere represents the domain of personal and
family life. The mediating element of the entire
system is the public sphere, comprising the main
political and cultural institutions-to-think-with,
including the press as a Fourth Estate. Although
this is frequently neglected in the Anglo-American
literature on Habermas, the public sphere has
two components, one political, the other cultural.
Habermas showed how the cultural public sphere
of literary journals and salons served, in part, as
a precursor and a training ground for political
deliberation and debate in a contemporary
sense. In its consolidated form, the public sphere
came to address two relatively separate agendas
through different genres: crudely, the individual
issues of culture and arts through fiction, and the
collective issues of politics and economy
through factual genres.
Historically, the public sphere had a proactive
function in asserting the economic and political
rights of individuals in their confrontation with
a feudal order. Once in place, the public sphere
also acquired a reactive function, negotiating
the terms of cooperation among citizens, and
between private citizens and the state. The
model, thus, represents a dual construct an
actual as well as an imagined reality of structure
and agency. On the one hand, the public-sphere
model locates media on a structural map
of society with other institutions: markets,
parliaments, and state agencies are all real
and effective. The issue, both theoretically and
normatively, has been the exact nature of the
interrelations between these institutions. On the
other hand, the public-sphere model represents
a plan of action it is neither a neutral
organizational chart nor a simple instance of
false consciousness. Because the public-sphere
model informs the interactions of everyday life,
it is reproduced, for better or worse, as common
sense or hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) a sense
of absolute because experienced reality beyond
which it is very difficult for most members of
the society to move, in most areas of their lives
(R. Williams, 1977: 110).

political and
cultural public
spheres

Introduction
Society

State

Private sphere

Public sphere

Intimate sphere

Cultural public sphere

Religion, sexuality,
emotion,
friendship, etc.

Preaching, art,
literature, music, etc.

Family

Organizations, clubs

Social sphere

Political public sphere

Object

Private economic
activity, production
and sale/purchase
of commodities,
including labor

Politics and the economy,

including social issues

Institution

Private enterprises
and stores

Parliamentary organs,
representing political parties,
and the press

Object

Institution

The (agencies
of the) state
ensure(s)
the material
infrastructure,
overall economic
stability, law
enforcement,
and regulation
of conflicts by
economic,
coercive, legal,
and ideological
means

Figure 1.4 The public-sphere model

new forms of
material and
immaterial
production

The last two centuries have witnessed a tug of

war, first, along the horizontal dimension of the
private, public, and state spheres of social activity
and, more recently, along its vertical dimension,
as well. Along the horizontal dimension, the
classic issue, in different national and cultural
contexts, has been the balance between marketdriven and publicly administered means of
communication: a private press; public-service
broadcasting; and an internet variously
anchored in military, scientific, and commercial
organizations (Abbate, 1999).
Along the vertical dimension of the publicsphere model, networked forms of communicative
agency challenge three different boundaries. First,
at the juncture of the social sphere (business) and
the intimate sphere (personal and family life),
new forms of material and immaterial production
have been emerging. Benkler (2006: 3), for one,
has suggested that the core of predominant
modes of production is being affected by the
combination of a global information economy,
private and public-service media Chapter 19, p. 354

the wide availability of cheap communication

technologies with excess capacity, and proliferating networks of non-market, non-state collaboration (see also Von Hippel, 2005). In earlier
critiques of Habermas model, feminist scholars
rightly noted a tendency, not just to overlook
the de facto exclusion of women from the public
sphere from the outset, but also to bracket labor
being conducted in the home, overwhelmingly
by women (Fraser, 1992). Digital media reopen
debates on the definition, organization, and
control of human labor.
Second, the boundary between the
political and cultural public spheres was in
question from the outset, and has appeared
increasingly porous. As an illustration, users
may approach comedy shows such as The
Daily Show with Jon Stewart, available on
television and online (19952011), on a par
with other sources of news (Feldman, 2007).
A comparative content analysis of The Daily
Show and US network television news, in
fact, found the substantive information of
the two program types concerning the 2004

17

18

transnational
alliances

civil society

K. B. Jensen
presidential election campaign to be the same
(Fox, et al., 2007). In a networked public
sphere, such interlinking is accelerated and
articulated as part of comparable agendas and
modes of address. Business corporations seek
to strengthen their legitimacy by addressing
the general public not merely as customers
or clients, but as citizens, through corporate
social responsibility, ethical accounting, and
ecological initiatives. State agencies justify
themselves to the public in the vocabulary of
customer service. Political parties and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) alike
must build and maintain constituencies whose
members conceive of themselves in a hybrid of
economic, cultural, and ethnic identities. And,
at least some audiences, some of the time,
come to act as senders as well as receivers of
information about the definition of political
and cultural agendas and issues.
The third column of the public-sphere model
the (nation-)state mostly remains firmly in
place. The system of nation-states had been
inaugurated by the Westphalian peace of 1648,
and was variously implemented in the following
centuries. A world economic system had begun to
take shape already from the sixteenth century, at
first centered in Western Europe. However, unlike
other such historical systems for example,
in the Middle East and China this economic
infrastructure did not develop into an empire or
political entity (Wallerstein, 1974: 348). Nations
took shape as delimited geographical units and
cultural formations imagined communities
(Anderson, 1991) as supported by newspapers
and novels as well as by maps, museums, and
the census. With an intensified globalization of
economy and politics in recent decades, nationstates enter into transnational alliances, such
as the European Union (EU) and the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and
they negotiate their coexistence in assemblies,
courts, and agencies inside and outside the
United Nations. During the same period, civil
society organizations have reasserted themselves
as a third sector of political, economic, and
cultural activity beyond states and markets (for
an overview, see Edwards, 2004). A transnational
public sphere, however, has yet to emerge (Fraser,
2007).

Outline of the handbook

The Handbook is divided into three
parts, covering the history of media and
communication research in different disciplines
and theoretical traditions; a systematics of
theoretical and empirical studies addressing the
various stages, contexts, and consequences of
communication; and the practice of planning,
conducting, and applying research and its
findings and insights in (other) social action.
Figure 1.5 lays out these elements with reference
to the scope and focus of each part, noting, as
well, a key premise of each section. Throughout
the volume, methodologies are given special
attention, because they encapsulate, at once,
the theoretical justifications and the analytical
procedures of various ways of doing media
and communication research.
Part I History traces the main sources of
science and scholarship that have informed
and shaped media and communication
research. While noting the roots of the field,
from classical rhetoric to early sociology, the
two chapters examining the humanities and
the social sciences, respectively focus on
contemporary conceptions of key ideas such
as culture and communication, interpretation
and interaction. A convergence particularly of
social-scientific and humanistic perspectives
has been ongoing since the 1980s. While this
development, arguably, has strengthened both
the academic quality and the social relevance
of the field, the contributors to Part I also
note some of the challenges and problems of
practicing convergence.
Part II Systematics turns from a diachronic
to a synchronic view of different traditions
or schools of research. In a systematic
perspective, they represent distinctive
conceptualizations of the various stages,
levels, and contexts of communication.
Whereas some traditions are clearly incompatible in their methodologies, epistemologies, or policies they can be examined,
in a meta-perspective, as complementary
perspectives on similar issues, sometimes
overlapping in unrecognized ways. One
divisive issue has been the degree to which

convergence of
social-scientific
and humanistic
perspectives

19

Introduction

History
Scope

Systematics

Practice

Theoretical

Empirical

Practices of

concepts and

approaches to the

conducting,

analytical

stages and contexts

justifying, and

procedures from:

of communication,

applying research

- Humanities

as defined by

- Social sciences

different research
traditions

Focus

Past sources of

Present

Future uses of

ideas on media,

operationalizations

research in

culture, and

and findings

scientific and social

communication

Premise

institutions

Interdisciplinary

Determination in

Unification in the

convergence

the first instance

final instance

Figure 1.5 An anatomy of media and communication research

technological, economic, and other social

factors could be said to determine the structure of media and the process of communication. Following Hall (1983) on determination in the first instance, the chapters,
in various ways, review how technological,
institutional, and discursive conditions both
enable and constrain communication: they
negatively determine what cannot be the
case, but they cannot positively predict what
will be the case.
Part III Practice presents and illustrates
qualitative, quantitative, as well as multimethod research designs. In addition to
separate chapters on the qualitative and the
quantitative research process, one chapter
specifically explores the relationship between
different methodologies the nature and
limits of complementarity. Addressing var
ious media forms and communicative
practices, three chapters detail the steps of
a research process from the articulation
and conceptualization of research questions, via data collection and analysis, to
interpretations and inferences. As a group,
determination in the first instance, p. 2

the chapters begin to suggest how a unification of the field might work, not in the
first instance, through a standardization of
elementary research procedures, but in the
final instance, through an open-ended application and comparison of multiple methodologies. The final chapter discusses research
as a social and communicative practice in its
own right, returning to the intellectual backgrounds and policy motivations of the field:
the classic normative theories of the press,
contemporary policy issues, and the instrumental uses of research in processes of social
planning and constant change.

unification
in the final
instance

PA RT

History

Sources of media and communication research

Media and communication research developed from a long heritage of diverse scientific disciplines
to address new conditions of communication in modern societies. The two chapters in Part I
present, discuss, and assess the contributions of the humanities and the social sciences, respectively
the two faculties or areas of inquiry that have been the main sources of theoretical concepts
and analytical procedures in the field.

Media and communication.The center of interest during the formation of the field was the
mass media. As means of communication, however, media technologies lend themselves to
conceptualization and analysis with reference to oral as well as literate forms of communication
throughout history. And, because media are commonly studied as part of specific social and
cultural contexts, many of the research issues and procedures that have been developed by
disciplines such as sociology and anthropology to account for communication as well as other
forms of human interaction transfer to media studies. The very categories and boundaries
of media and communication are currently in question in view of digital media that enable
mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive communication, inviting a reassessment of the disciplinary
sources of the field.
Humanities and social sciences. The modern humanities can be traced to the early
nineteenth century; the social sciences date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, when they were separated institutionally from other human sciences. During the
past century, the two areas of inquiry have been in contact, sometimes in dialogue. It was only
after 1945, however, that particular components and concerns of each faculty were joined in
an emerging field of media and communication research.
Field or discipline? It has remained an open question whether these two mainstreams, by
now, have merged sufficiently to constitute not just a field, but a discipline, as defined by
an established set of research questions, methodologies, and institutions. Several chapters
address this question, and Chapter 19 elaborates on the relationship between media studies
and the societies of which they like the media are a part.

The humanistic sources of media

and communication research
Klaus Bruhn Jensen

a classical agenda: the heritage of philosophy for communication theory

medium theory: the implications of modern media technologies for traditional issues of communication and
culture
four theoretical traditions in the history of ideas: rhetoric, hermeneutics, phenomenology, semiotics
humanistic disciplines feeding into the interdisciplinary field of media studies: art history, literary criticism,
linguistics, film studies
current challenges to the humanities as well as to media and communication research: postmodernism,
feminism, cognitivism

A classical agenda

knowledge as
a product of
research

Contrary to a common notion, the humanities

are not direct descendants of classical Greek
philosophy (Kristeller, 1961: 323). In their
recognizably modern form, the humanities
date from the early nineteenth century, when
universities were taking shape as institutions
of research, as associated with the German
tradition of Wilhelm von Humboldt (Fallon,
1980; Rudy, 1984). The understanding of
knowledge as a product of research had been
preceded by at least two alternative conceptions
of knowledge, either as self-awareness (summed
up in the Delphi oracles admonition to
Know thyself!) or as traditional learning,
administered and passed on by a class of learned
people (Kjrup, 2001: 2022). While the latter
two concepts are still encountered as subtexts,
it is the development of analytical procedures
and conceptual frameworks for research which
has occupied humanistic scholars during
the immediate prehistory of media and
communication research.

Much of the agenda for this development,

to be sure, was inherited from the classics.
They continue to be suggestive, less about
what to think, than which issues to think
about. Theories of human communication
and theories of human knowledge share similar
conceptual problems: what we know is, in one
aspect, what we can communicate about. This
chapter, accordingly, first retraces part of the
classical legacy of communication studies, before
outlining the main traditions from the history of
ideas that entered into the modern humanities
rhetoric, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and
semiotics. These traditions, in turn, informed
the disciplines from linguistics and literary
studies to art history and film studies which
ultimately fed into the contemporary field
of media and communication. The chapter
concludes with an assessment of how recent
interdisciplinary challenges postmodernism,

agenda-setting research, Chapter 8, p. 161

24

K. B. Jensen
feminism, and cognitivism might redraw the
map of the humanities and of media studies.
A common denominator for the production
of meaning in communication and of knowledge
in science is intersubjectivity: How, by what
means, is a shared understanding of certain
phenomena in reality possible? In the fourth
century BCE, Aristotle had presented probably
the first communication model:

Aristotle

Spoken words are the symbols of mental

experience and written words are the
symbols of spoken words. Just as all men
have not the same writing, so all men have
not the same speech sounds, but the mental
experiences, which these directly symbolize,
are the same for all, as also are those things
of which our experiences are the images.
(Aristotle, 2007: n.p.)
Things in the world, mental impressions of
them, and peoples oral or written expressions
about the things as well as the impressions
those are minimal elements of most theories of
either knowledge or communication. It is the
status and interrelations of the elements that
have continued to trouble philosophy and the
range of natural, human, and social sciences.
Scholars have debated the existence of any
shared reality, the social and cultural variability
of experience, and the very nature of reality,
subjects, and signs.
Both spoken language and other signs enable
us to communicate about that which is not
present in immediate space, time, or experience.
In the writings of Aristotle we find explicitly
stated for the first time the conception of a sign
as an observed event or state of affairs that is
evidence for its interpreter for what is at least
temporarily absent (Clarke, 1990: 11). Speech
sounds and gestures provide access to diverse
possible worlds that can be shared with others
in communication. Present signs allow for
absent realities, including the virtual worlds of
thought experiments. Writing, print, electronic,
and digital media, each in specific ways, have
radically extended the capacity of humans to
intersubjectivity as a condition of communication and
research Chapter 15, p. 283

imagine, represent, and communicate about

possible as well as actual worlds, also in each
others absence. Present media allow for absent
realities, absent communicators, or both.
If symbolic communication in speech, along
with abstract thinking and self-awareness, had
provided the minimal conditions for humanitas,
for civilized coexistence (Megarry, 1995: 48),
writing and later technological media introduced
a unique set of tools for human enterprise. They
enhanced the potential both for social interaction
and for humans transformation of their
common natural environment. Such a structural
or conditioning effect of media, for one thing,
dwarfs any other effects the media may be
shown to have on individuals, groups, or institutions. For another thing, the understanding
of such a medium effect is one of the central
contributions of historical and other humanistic
research to media studies.

humanitas

Medium theory
In an overview and redevelopment of medium
theory, Joshua Meyrowitz (1994: 50) summed
up its key question: What are the relatively
fixed features of each means of communicating
and how do these features make the medium
physically, psychologically, and socially different
from other media and from face-to-face
interaction?
The most well-known proponent of a strong
position regarding the scope and depth of media
impact on consciousness and culture, summed
up in his dictum, the medium is the message,
remains Marshall McLuhan. His most
influential book (McLuhan, 1964) examined
the media as extensions of the human senses
with fundamental and permanent consequences
for the awareness of self, others, and history.
Among his polemical conclusions was that
writing and, not least, print had constrained
people within a linear logic of typographic
culture. In contrast, electronic media, and above
all television, was said to signal a release of
cultural creativity from the Gutenberg galaxy
(McLuhan, 1962). This hope for a new epoch of

media effects Chapter 8

the medium
is the
message

Humanistic Sources

historical
perspective

participatory culture anticipated later utopian

visions of the internet.
Being a literary scholar, McLuhan tended
to map changes in the textual and thematic
structures of media rather directly onto their
social and cultural context. His main source of
inspiration, Harold A. Innis, another Canadian,
but a political economist and historian, stated
his arguments in a more traditional scholarly
fashion (Innis, 1951, 1972[1950]). Applying
principles from the study of economic mono
polies to information monopolies, he identified
some of the ways in which power can be both
exercised and subverted via media. Like other
medium theorists, he pointed to the historical
significance of media in challenging religious
authorities, when the medieval Churchs
monopoly over religious information, and
thereby over salvation, was broken by the
printing press (Meyrowitz, 1994: 51). More
grandly, Innis suggested that the structure
of entire cultures and empires has a bias
toward either space or time, in the sense that
the dominant media will favor either stability
over time or extended territories. Examples
include stone tablets, whose inscriptions last a
long time, but do not travel well, as opposed
to papyrus and paper, which will support the
administration of distant provinces, but which
are vulnerable to destruction and to being
appropriated for purposes of social change.
Though less familiar in the media field,
other researchers departing from historical and
anthropological angles have substantiated the
relevance of medium theory. Like Innis, they
have sought to avoid any strong technological
determinism, exploring the social and cultural
forms in which shifting technologies are
diffused and adapted. In a historical perspective,
Havelock (1963) suggested how writing and
literacy had paved the way for an entirely new
category of social system, interpreting Platos
attack on the poets as announcing the passing
of an oral culture: Poets could no longer be
trusted in social and practical matters, such
as politics, the writing of history, and science,
even if their poetry could still be appreciated
as personal opinion or myth. Regarding the

next categorical transition from writing to

print Eisenstein (1979) showed how, initially,
it was the scribal culture of elites centered
in monasteries, not oral or popular culture,
that was transformed by the printing press,
stimulating Renaissance and Reformation.
Mass literacy still lay in the future in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
From an anthropological perspective,
Goody and Watt (1963) questioned relativist
views of the cultural consequences of new
media and communication systems. One of
their arguments was that writing and literacy
are not only strategic social resources, but
necessary conditions of, for example, political
democracy (see also Goody, 1987, 2000). The
general point was documented empirically in a
major study by Scribner and Cole (1981), who
further showed that, within one culture, several
different literacies, each with distinctive social
uses, can be associated with different languages
(in their case Vai, Arabic, and English). In
sum, language(s) as well as media technologies
establish certain outer parameters that make
certain communicative practices either possible
or impossible in a given historical and cultural
setting. 55
As if to prove their point, that ideas are
shaped by contemporary media, several of
the key studies cited here were published
within the span of a few years at a transitional
moment of media history (Goody and Watt,
1963; Havelock, 1963; McLuhan, 1964). They
appeared at a time of political and cultural
upheaval when television was contributing
to new notions of culture and the media in
both research and public debate. In society
at large, television challenged the great divide
between high and low cultures (Huyssen,
1986) and blurred the dividing lines between
public and private social life, as later studied by
Meyrowitz (1985). In the academy, television
joined film, radio, and other popular cultural
forms as legitimate objects of analysis, even if
books and other print media were and are
still widely perceived as the self-evident media
of the humanistic heritage.
determination in the first instance, Chapter 1, p. 2

the biases of communication Chapter 12, p. 224

history of the media Chapter 12, p. 222

25

anthropological
perspective

26

K. B. Jensen

- c. 35,000

cave paintings by prehistoric humans

- c. 3100

hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing

- c. 1800

Linear A writing

- c. 1450

Linear B writing

- c. 1200

Chinese ideographic writing

- c. 1000

Phoenician alphabet

- c. 730

phonetic alphabet (Greece)

1041

printing from movable type (China)

1241

metal type for printing (Korea)

1455

Gutenberg prints from movable metal type and hand press (Germany)

1605

regularly published newspaper (Germany)

1814

flatbed cylinder press

1839

photography

1844

telegraph

1846

double-cylinder rotary press

1867

typewriter

1876

telephone

1888

phonograph for public sale

1895

films shown to public

1895

radio transmission

1911

television transmission

1920

scheduled radio broadcasting

1936

scheduled television broadcasting

1945

programmable electronic computer

1947

transistor

1948

long-playing gramophone record

1956

videotape

1957

satellite (Sputnik)

1962

television transmission via satellite

1963

compact cassette audiotape

1969

ARPANET

1971

microprocessor

1976

VHS video cassette recorder

1976

teletext

1978

telefax (with international standard)

1979

Walkman

1980

Cable News Network (CNN)

1981

Music Television (MTV)

1981

IBM personal computer

1982

audio compact disc

1984

Apple Macintosh computer

1991

World Wide Web

1991

GSM digital mobile phone network

1993

graphic web browser

1994

(we)blogs

1998

Google search engine

2001

commercial 3G mobile network

2002

social network sites

Figure 2.1 A brief chronology of human communication (adapted from Rogers, 1986: 2526)

27

Humanistic Sources
Medium theory offers a fertile framework for
studying the historical and cultural variations
of media and communication; it also represents
a middle ground between the textual focus of
the humanities and the institutional focus of
the social sciences. Admittedly, it lends itself to
hyperbolic formulations of the kind that made
McLuhan a personality also in the media, as if
each new media technology would determine a
new type of culture and society. Applied carefully,
however, medium theory supports media studies
in a middle range (Merton 1968: 39), steering
empirical research between the Scylla of myopic
methodologies and the Charybdis of grand
theories. In the humanities, the main currents of
ideas have themselves been shaped, in part, by their
orientation toward specific media and their social
uses. The primary example, both historically and
as a continued influence on the study of human
communication, is the art, science, and practice of
rhetoric, which revolves around spoken language
and humans as embodied media. 8

Four traditions in the history of

ideas
Rhetoric
The rhetorical tradition is by far the oldest set
of ideas informing humanistic research, and it
remained centrally influential from antiquity into
the nineteenth century, not just in scholarship,
but also within education under shifting cultural
and institutional circumstances (for an overview,
see Kennedy, 1980). Its legacy for contemporary
research on communication and culture can
be summarized with reference to three sets of
concepts. First, the rhetorical tradition refers to
five stages in preparing a speech:
inventio (the collection and conception of
the subject matter)
dispositio (structuring the speech)
elocutio (its linguistic articulation)
memoria
(memorizing
the
resulting
configuration of form and content)
actio (performing the speech).
middle range theories Chapter 3, p. 64
media of the first degree Chapter 1, p. 5

Of the five stages, inventio, particularly,

recognizes an intimate relationship between
knowing something and knowing how to
communicate about it. Certain ways of
speaking are appropriate in a political arena,
others in a courtroom, others again on a festive
occasion; each context has its own purpose
and subject matter, both of which are given
material shape in the speech. Dispositio and
especially elocutio, next, supply the concrete
procedures shaping the speech. Rhetorical
figures of speech and symbolic forms have
entered into both the study and practice of
much literature and other arts.
Second, in addressing the audience through
actio, a speaker draws on three means of
persuasion:
ethos
logos
pathos.
These focus, respectively, on the (ethical)
character of the speaker, the (logical) quality
of his/her arguments, and the (more or
less pathetic) emotions which the speech is
designed to evoke in the listeners. Importantly,
the three means are all present in any act of
communication, but in different measures and
combinations, depending on the purpose and,
hence, the genre of communication. Whereas
the three aspects of addressing an audience have
their most obvious relevance for such explicitly
persuasive genres as advertising and political
communication, they lend themselves to the
study of most types of technologically mediated
communication.
Third, the concept of topos, which classical
rhetoric considered as one part of inventio, is
of special interest, because it suggests a figure
of thought that suffuses modern humanities,
as well. Topos means place, and implies that
commonplaces are, literally, common places in
a known or imagined terrain which speakers
share with their audience. This understanding
of reality as a text and, conversely, of the text
as a spatial and temporal universe that can
be searched for traces and clues, has been a
persistent metaphor in the humanities up until,
and including, theories of the internet and

topos

28

K. B. Jensen

the new
rhetoric

mobile media. A topical form of argument

can rely on one or a few concrete examples,
rather than a great deal of formal evidence, as
long as the examples fit into the commonplaces
which make up the working assumptions of
the individuals communicating. Accordingly,
Aristotle noted, rhetoric is the source of a kind
of knowledge which is probable and reasonable.
In this regard, rhetoric is complementary to
logic, which addresses other aspects of reality
about which necessary or certain knowledge
can be achieved (Clarke, 1990: 13).
The close link in classical rhetoric between
communication and knowledge was gradually
relaxed, as manifested in the development
of so many practical manuals of speaking
well in public. This shift helps to account for
the common pejorative reference to only
rhetoric communication as a superficial
form and as misrepresentation and manipulation. Furthermore, rhetorical concepts
were redeveloped from their oral sources and
applied to literate forms of communication, for
example, literary fiction and, later, to texts in
general. Nevertheless, the rhetorical tradition
has remained an important source of ideas
regarding the nature of both face-to-face and
technologically
mediated
communication.
During the twentieth century, rhetoric enjoyed
a renaissance, sometimes under the heading of a
new rhetoric (Perelman, 1979), which, among
other things, gave more specific attention to the
concrete interaction of communicators with
their audiences. A second inspiration came
from analytic philosophy and its examination
of the structure of informal argument (Toulmin,
2003[1958]).
Although European scholarship may
have been especially instrumental in feeding
the rhetorical tradition into contemporary
research, a vigorous American substream also
has cultivated rhetorical and other humanistic approaches to communication studies
(Kennedy, 1980). Among the most important
influences has been the work of Kenneth Burke,
who developed a view of language as action
(Burke, 1950), and of literature as both a social
and an aesthetic phenomenon (Burke, 1957).

His perspective was subsequently applied to the

mass media, for example, in the case of political
communication (Duncan, 1968; Edelman,
1971). In media studies, James Carey (1989a)
was a central figure advocating a broadly
rhetorical as well as historical perspective
on the interrelations between modern media
and earlier cultural forms. As expressed in his
ritual model, also technologically mediated
communication serves to create and maintain
community the common root of the two
words suggests as much.
Saying something amounts to doing
something from everyday promises, excuses,
and jokes, to formal ceremonies joining people
into partnerships and nations into alliances.
Whereas the understanding of communication
as a form of action has been particularly
pronounced in recent decades, in the longer
history of ideas it is one of the lessons of
classical rhetoric for contemporary humanistic
disciplines. Like rhetoric, media studies have
sought to strike a balance between a focus on the
textual structures of messages as products and
on messages as resources of action within social
processes. This balancing act was witnessed
also in the wider humanities over the course of
twentieth century in linguistic, communicative,
and pragmatic turns. At the same time, a
rhetorical conception of communication as
action has provided one of the conceptual and
methodological bridges between humanistic
research on media texts and social-scientific
research on communicative practices.

Hermeneutics
While the point of departure for rhetoric was
speech, particularly concerning matters of fact
and how to argue about them, hermeneutics
developed out of the practice of reading
and understanding written texts, not least
narratives, including fiction. Its general purpose
has been to clarify the nature and preconditions
of interpretation, with reference simultaneously

ritual model of communication, see Chapter 1, p. 12

meaning as product and process Chapter 1, p. 11

logic Chapter 15, p. 289

linguistic, communicative, and pragmatic turns, p. 34

Humanistic Sources

religious and
legal texts

consciousness
as a text

the Great
Chain of Being

to the structure of the text and to the activity of

the reader.
The texts at issue originally belonged to
religion and law. The preferred interpretation
of both biblical and legal scriptures could make
or break individuals; dissenters were, literally,
ex-communicated from the communities in
question. Equally, interpretive disputes would
pit communities and nations against each
other in religious struggles, warfare, or both.
Over time, the principles and procedures
of hermeneutics came to be applied to the
arts and additional kinds of texts, even to
human experience as such. Indeed, a common
humanistic conception of consciousness, shared
across the four traditions that are reviewed here,
is as a text that calls for constant interpretation.
In a historical overview, Paul Ricoeur (1981:
Ch. 1), himself a central contributor to modern
hermeneutic philosophy, identified a transition
in the early nineteenth century from a regional
to a general hermeneutics, which now covered
both secular and religious texts. The transition
was advanced particularly in the work of the
German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich
Schleiermacher.
Hermeneutics, thus, participated in a long
movement within the history of ideas, from a
religious cosmology toward a historical and
secular understanding of human existence. The
medieval analogy between The Book of Nature
and other books, above all, The Good Book, as
means of insight into the Great Chain of Being
(Lovejoy, 1936), in which everything had its
divinely sanctioned place, was finally breaking
down. Texts became a new focus of attention in
their own right, as sources of scientific evidence
and of aesthetic contemplation, rather than being
primarily interfaces with the hereafter. At the
inception of the modern humanities, then, the
Text was taking center stage, together with the
individual human being. Hermeneutics appeared
to offer means of resolving interpretive conflicts,
beyond matters of faith and aesthetics, and in
some social affairs, as well.
The practical implications of hermeneutics for doing communication research are
suggested by the key concept of a hermeneutic

circle (Figure 2.2). The most basic, ancient

insight of hermeneutics is that the meaning of
one part of a text can only be understood in
relation to the whole of the text. While perhaps
commonsensical, this insight contradicts the
equally common assumption that the meaning
of a message is the sum of its parts, so that
communication might be studied by breaking
messages down into their constituent elements.
Hermeneutics suggests that the very process of
reading and analyzing a text is both creative
and incremental readers gradually work out
their categories of understanding in order to
arrive at a coherent interpretation.
This dialectic at the level of the individual
text, however, is only the first step in working
out its meanings and implications. Next, the full
text must itself be interpreted as a part of larger
wholes. For example, a novel may express the
mindset of its author, who might be said to
articulate the entire worldview of his/her epoch
or culture. Such an understanding of the wider
nexus of texts and contexts, as an extension
of the basic part-whole dialectic, dates from
the period when a general hermeneutics,
applying to all types of texts, was conceived.
It also anticipated the more recent concept of
intertextuality.
One further development of the hermeneutic
circle, during the twentieth century, specifically took into account the role of the reader.
The point is suggested by another set of twin
concepts preunderstanding and understanding
which was developed especially in the work
of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975[1960]). On the
one hand, any understanding requires a preunderstanding a prejudice in the neutral sense.
On the other hand, understanding can serve to
either reproduce or contest the readers preunderstanding. Throughout the activity of reading,
people perform minimal or subinterpretations,
which may realign their frames of interpretation. In doing so, they enter into a dialogue
with the text and, by extension, with other
minds, past as well as present. Most grandly,
they partake of culture the cultivation and
renewal of tradition.

secularization Chapter 11, p. 206

intertextuality Chapter 10, p. 192

29
the
hermeneutic
circle

prejudice
and preunderstanding

30

K. B. Jensen

Pattern of interpretation

Sub-interpretation
WHOLE

PRE-UNDERSTANDING

UNDERSTANDING

PART

Text

Dialogue

Figure 2.2 The hermeneutic circle (source: Alvesson and Skldberg,

2009: 104)

fusion of
horizons

hermeneutics
of suspicion

The hermeneutic circle can be understood

as a model of communication, as it unfolds not
just in the here and now between a text and
a reader, but down through history, between
cultures, and across media. In hermeneutic (and
phenomenological) terminology, communicative
processes involve a fusion of horizons a
meeting and merging of the expectations that
all communicators bring with them into an
exchange with others. Recent contributors
to the hermeneutic tradition, especially, have
pointed to the dangers of such fusion and of an
immediate empathy with tradition. Referring
to the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,
Ricoeur (1981: 46) identified and redeveloped
a hermeneutics of suspicion. Its particular
purpose is to discover hidden principles behind
what other people as well as social institutions
say and do, thus enabling a distinction between
surface and reality. People do not always say
what they mean, or mean what they say. Since
these principles may equally be hidden to those
persons and institutions, working behind their
backs, the general social charge of hermeneutics
can be seen as that of reading between the

lines and feeding its interpretations back to

society. Particularly the critical tradition in
communication research has taken on this task
in studies of media texts as well as of institutions
and audiences.
Hermeneutics has had a lasting influence
on media and communication studies in three
different respects. First, it brings home the
general point that human communication
is a complex process which always calls for
interpretation, and sometimes for suspicion.
Second, hermeneutics has been a specific
source of inspiration, for instance, in theoretical frameworks regarding the reception of
media, and in methodological approaches
to historical sources. Third, and finally, the
hermeneutic tradition serves as a constant
reminder that also research is a hermeneutic,
and doubly hermeneutic (Giddens, 1979)
activity, interpreting the interpretations of
others as to how and why they communicate.

Phenomenology
Interrelated with hermeneutics in the history
of ideas and as a methodological orientation
to collecting and interpreting evidence,
phenomenology emerged as a distinctive school
of philosophy around 1900 (for an overview,
see Smith, 2009). The date is significant,
because phenomenology can be understood as
a defensive reaction against the reductionism
which was then seen to threaten a traditional
humanistic understanding of consciousness as
a lived and interpreted whole whether in the
form of positivism or in the psychological
and social-scientific disciplines then taking
shape. In response, the phenomenological
tradition insisted on the unique qualities and
insights of ordinary human experience. In the
social sciences, its influence has, arguably, been
at least as strong as in the humanities, providing
a philosophical legitimation for interpretive
critical media and communication research
Chapter 19, p. 359
reception studies Chapter 9
historiography Chapter 12, p. 219
double hermeneutics Chapter 19, p. 351
positivism Chapter 15, p. 291