Professional Documents
Culture Documents
AND
COMMUNICATIONS
John Durham Peters and Jefferson D. Pooley
OUTLINE
I. COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL THEORY
a. Definitions
b. Trends
• Chicagoans:
Communication is the description of human relationships and
an ideal of democratic participation.
• E. A. Ross:
Communication involves institutions and practices of recording
and transmitting symbols.
a. Definitions
Sociological Response
Outward (media) standardization
Inward (social) differentiation
II. CONTEMPORARY
ISSUES
a. The National Frame
• Communications and the Mass media were designed to:
-Link the nation-state with the household.
-Couples the “system” (market and state) & “lifeworld”
(civil society and family).
a. The National Frame
• Broadcasting: Co-oriented national populace and in its address of
a listenership at home
• Radio: medium of musically differentiated taste cultures or
“formats”
• Films: high revenues for Hollywood movies
• Television: audience are huge but increasingly fragmented into
demographic segments due to channel proliferation and
migration onto the internet
a. The National Frame
Fragmentation replaced homogenization as the fear aroused by media
• States seek to protect national culture by building blockage (for sex and politics):
BUT the miniaturization and cheapening of media production also fuels
transborder media flows.
BUT the ease of citizen production (and piracy) bypasses traditional
gatekeepers.
d. Implications of Digital Media
• The internet contains all previous media forms -telegraphy, telephony,
phonography, radio, television, film, books, magazines, newspapers,
and videogames and advertising
• Issues:
1. Intellectual property rights
2. Regulation of internet access
3. Bounds of privacy
e. The Great Communications Switch
Strangest and Subtlest Shifts:
Increasing mediation of interpersonal interaction by phone, email, social networks
Parasocial Interaction:
Feeling that people have personal relationships with media figures
f. Sociologists in the Media Sociology
• A paradox of media sociology is that most of it has been the work of
non–sociologist
• Sociology, with the ambition to understand social life has neglected a
central dimension- communication
• Sociological theory only touches on media questions glancingly and
has sidestepped media institutions in its studies of expressive culture
• Sociologists have been returning to communication questions-
sociology of the internet
If society is a network of symbolic interactions, then…
“SOCIETY EXISTS IN
COMMUNICATION”