Media Sociology

8 Key excerpts on "Media Sociology"

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  eBook - ePub

  Soziologie - Sociology in the German-Speaking World

  Special Issue Soziologische Revue 2020

  • Betina Hollstein, Rainer Greshoff, Uwe Schimank, Anja Weiß, Betina Hollstein, Rainer Greshoff, Uwe Schimank, Anja Weiß(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Sutter, 2013 ). But a lot has changed in recent years. If we talk about media today, we may still bring legacy mass media such as newspapers or television into the equation. However, for more and more people media means the various digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or Netflix that many of us now take for granted. Even when we talk about newspapers and television, we are no longer referring to these legacy media but to new digital arrangements instead.

  Just as the phenomena of Media Sociology have leaned towards the digital, so too has Media Sociology shifted in the approaches it takes, which in turn requires innovative theoretical strategies to help make sense of a media environment in rapid flux that is characterized by a great variety of media. With these changes, however, Media Sociology as a field has entered vague territory. From an international perspective, Silvio Waisbord (2014; 2019) argued that no single coherent Media Sociology exists; rather, sociologists engage with issues of media and communications in different ways. As a consequence, he defined Media Sociology as “the study of media processes and phenomena anchored in classic and contemporary sociological questions and methods” (Waisbord, 2014 : 7). If we take this understanding as a basis for this discussion, Media Sociology extends into the farther reaches of media and communication studies as a scientific discipline. This is also the case for Media Sociology in Germany: both the German Communication Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft, DGPuK) and the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie; DGS) have specific divisions dedicated to Media Sociology.1 If one considers the shift in media toward the digital, Media Sociology becomes even more complex as it veers into the realms of “digital sociology” (Lupton, 2015 ) and spans many other areas of German sociology such as the sociology of science and technology or social theory (Philipps, 2017

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  McQuail's Media and Mass Communication Theory

  • Denis McQuail, Mark Deuze(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  For present purposes, the domain of ‘society’ refers to the material base (economic and political resources and power), to social relationships (in national societies, communities, families, etc.), and to social roles and occupations that are socially regulated (formally or informally). The domain of ‘culture’ refers primarily to other essential aspects of social life, especially to symbolic expression (and the way people create shared narratives), values, meanings and practices (social customs and routines, institutional ways of doing things and personal habits). Most of the chapter is concerned with explaining the main theories or theoretical perspectives that have been developed for understanding the way media work in society. Such theories generally take material and social circumstances as a primary determinant for explaining the role of mass media and communication in society. However, and particularly in more contemporary approaches to theory development, there is also scope for recognizing the influence that ideas and culture can have on material conditions. Before theories of media and society are considered, the main issues or broad themes that have framed enquiry into media and mass communication are described. A general frame of reference for looking at the connections between media and society is also proposed. First, we return in more detail to the conundrum of the relation between culture and society. Media, Society and Culture: Connections and Conflicts Mass media and communication can be considered as both a ‘societal’ and a ‘cultural’ phenomenon, and they are also a range of technologies. The media institution is part of the structure of society, and its technological infrastructure is part of the economic and power base, while the ideas, images and information disseminated by the media are evidently an important aspect of our culture (in the sense defined above)

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  The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology

  • David Inglis, Anna-Mari Almila, David Inglis, Anna-Mari Almila, Author(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Cultural Sociology of News Media

  Ronald N. Jacobs

  INTRODUCTION

  Media Sociology appears to be making a comeback. New edited volumes assessing the field are appearing (e.g. Alexander et al., forthcoming; Waisbord, 2014), and media-focused articles are beginning to appear with slightly more regularity in the general-interest sociology journals (e.g. Bail, 2012; Brym et al., 2014; Couldry, 2014). A big reason for this resurgence is the growth and institutionalization of cultural sociology, whose practitioners have consistently recognized the central role that media play in people's lives. The British journal Cultural Sociology has regularly published work on media, as has the more recent American Journal of Cultural Sociology.

  It is not surprising that cultural sociologists would be interested in the worlds of media and journalism. At the institutional level, the products that are produced by media organizations are centrally connected to a vast, interconnected, and global cultural industry. Today, virtually all cultural products are shaped by media institutions. Furthermore, because of the mediatization of social life, the Geertzian ‘webs of significance’ within which actors find themselves suspended are always already mediated webs. Contemporary society is a deeply intertextual space of linguistic, sonic, and iconic bricolage, in which people construct meanings about their world by combining and adapting scripts that they get from media texts, and in which those meanings frequently get posted in the various environments of user-generated media.

  News media and journalism are not the only parts of the media world worth studying, but they remain one of the most important empirical sites of interest for cultural sociologists and media scholars alike. Journalists continue to act as key gatekeepers of the public sphere, even as their legitimacy is challenged by new arenas and styles of public debate, and even as the distinction between news and entertainment grows ever more porous (delli Carpini and Williams, 2011; Jacobs and Townsley, 2011). Audiences continue to turn to the products of journalism, even if they find those products in new ways, and even if they find them jumbled together with the other media content that streams in front of them in a nearly continuous scroll.

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  Available until 27 Jan |Learn more

  Media of Reason

  A Theory of Rationality

  • Matthias Vogel, Darrell Arnold(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  WHAT ARE MEDIA?

  Hardly any concept has been circulated with such numerous and often dramatically underspecified meanings as that of media. While academic reference works1 have been rather hesitant to list the concept and have only recently begun to do so—with a largely semiotic understanding—in everyday language, as well as theoretical contexts, it is used in varied ways. In social theory contexts alone the collection of explications characterizing media yields an astoundingly heterogeneous composite. On the basis of his study of the concepts of the media theory of Parsons, Luhmann, and Habermas, Jan Künzler has compiled the following list:

  Languages, symbolic meaning, the definition of a situation, affect, intelligence, performance capacity, value-commitment, influence, power, money, law, truth, love, joy, art, belief, reputation, the formation of transcendental order, health, the formation of empirical order: all that is supposed to be media.2

  If one extends the study beyond the parameters of sociology and social theory, the compilation can be extended beyond nearly all limits. So in the area of so-called media studies, a discipline that has been struggling to specify its field of research since its emergence at the beginning of the 1960s and that has been searching for a conception of medium,3 heterogeneous concepts of media have arisen, above all as a result of diverse attempts to link up with the varied vocabularies of established disciplines. Such concepts show clear traces of the theoretical contexts to which they are closely related. One can clearly differentiate between the conceptual views from public relations, information theory, and communication sociology, but also literature and theater studies.4 Alongside, and at times transverse to, these media concepts, which are closely connected with the need to provide media studies with an orientation, there is also research that refers to individual “media” such as radio or film.5 It seems to me that this situation of media studies is characterized by two features: on the one hand, by discussions that—in light of the low degree of institutionalization of the young discipline, as well as the lack of specification of the discipline that may be responsible for this—threaten to prevent developments in a discipline that merely engages in confident reassertions of its ambiguous conceptualization; on the other hand, by a marked lack of sovereignty in dealing with media concepts that are not part of media theory in the narrow sense.6

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  Media, Society, World

  Social Theory and Digital Media Practice

  • Nick Couldry(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  what are people doing that is related to media?

  This requires a wide definition of ‘media’ (see chapter 1), encompassing not just traditional media (television, radio, press, film) but all the other media platforms, mobile or fixed, through which content of any sort – both institutionally and individually produced – is now accessible or transmissible. The ‘systemness’ of media that shapes action can, as Friedrich Krotz notes, take many forms.9

  Our questions about media-related practice should not be limited by the immediate concerns of media industries or media history. Indeed, some interesting questions about media may be inspired by very different histories. Take the development of memory and mnemonics.10 In the pre-modern era, the scarcity of information storage and flows put a premium on the arts of memory and retrieval, but does today’s over-abundance of information put a premium on new arts of selection and combination ? Media hype about the universality of change in media, captured in crude notions of ‘the net generation’ or loose distinctions between young ‘digital natives’ and older generations of digital immigrants, is unhelpful.11 As Susan Herring points out, the ‘net generation’ is an adult construct which obscures our grasp of how communication needs, and their solutions, are (or are not ) changing, and if changing, how fast and against what resistance.12 That is not to deny important shifts are going on: for younger people in many countries, computers are now part of the social infrastructure.13 Equally, no one could deny that cultural production and dissemination have been radically transformed in the past fifteen years, yet there are significant numbers even in countries such as the UK and USA for whom even basic access to the online world is still not guaranteed. If those who create online content, even in the USA, are stratified by gender and class, then the heralded transition from a ‘read-only culture’ to a ‘read/write culture’ is not assured.14 In this controversial terrain, an approach open to the varieties

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  The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies

  • John D. H. Downing, Denis McQuail, Philip Schlesinger, Ellen Wartella, John D. H. Downing, Denis McQuail, Philip Schlesinger, Ellen A. (Ann) Wartella(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  19 NEWS MEDIA PRODUCTION Individuals, Organizations, and Institutions D. Charles Whitney, Randall S. Sumpter, and Denis McQuail he mass media have been studied in reasonably formal and I systematic ways for quite a long time, about as long as Western media systems have been composed of true mass media as we tend to define them today—as mechanisms for delivering content to large, heterogeneous, dispersed, anonymous audiences that have restricted opportunities to respond to the producers of that content (cf. McQuail, 2 0 0 0 ) . Because media organizations, industries, and institutions are sites of research—and at various levels of analysis, a variety of methods of studying them have been employed—we first briefly survey the history of systematically studying media, delineate the most frequently employed theoretical models used in the field, summarize an argument for orga-nizing this study by levels of analysis, and then return to catalogue the methods with some research exemplars for each. We should note at the outset, however, that even though this is a chapter on research methods in studying media organizations and institutions, no methods that we know of are unique or peculiar to the study of them, and hence researchers seeking technical advice on methods should also consult more standard texts on research methodology. 1 • 393 T 394 • Economy and Power • The Advent of Media Sociology The primary purpose of studying media is to understand why media organizations, a specific medium, or the mass media institu-tion produces the kinds of content it does. The birth of Media Sociology, however, around the turn of the past century, was not an academic enterprise but was in response to both practical and social prob-lems engendered by the rise of mass com-mercial media. 2 On the business side, a nascent national advertising industry was eager to have credible circulation data on the rapidly expanding metropolitan press: The U.S.

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  Critique of Information

  • Scott Lash(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  $ Media Theory The Strong Programme in the sociology of science holds that for a theory to be valid it must be reflexive (Barnes et al., 1996). That is, it must be applic-able to itself. In Chapter 5 we just saw how reflexive and information-rich knowledge had as its unintended consequences an out-of-control object. This poses questions about theory itself. Does it not follow that theory itself would be an unruly object? Ideal-typical for such unruly objects in the con-temporary era is not industrial goods, but information and communication products. In other words, ideal-typical for such contingent circulating objects are, in a very important sense, media . It follows thus that social and cultural theory would increasingly take on the form of media theory . If critique can be no longer transcendental, but must be immanent to the information order, the critique of information becomes, increasingly, media theory. What follows, in a context in which both critique and reflection are in perhaps ter-minal decline, are some critical reflections on what such a media theory might be. Media Society, Media Theory What this chapter intends to do is explore the idea of ‘media theory’. This chapter will explore not the social theory of the media, nor cultural theory of the media, but media theory . What I will suggest below is that media theory is the paradigmatic form of thinking in today’s global information society. What I will suggest is that the media give the model, establish the paradigm for information in today’s world. More specifically, we will see below that the mass media of communication, which preceded the computer age by a great number of decades, already established a paradigm for the information age: a model that only has much more recently, with its mass pervasion through explicitly information technology, achieved hegemony. I want to suggest that in this sense the information society is just as much and perhaps more accurately labelled the ‘media society’.

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  Communication Theory

  Media, Technology and Society

  • David Holmes, Author(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

      Effects analysis quickly established itself as a serious pursuit of sociological research. In American sociology, dominated as it was by positivist methodologies, the opportunity for empirical testing of the various theories about media effects presented itself (see McQuire, 1995).

  4     For the former function, see, for example, Leavis (1930); for the latter function, see Chakhotin (1939).

  5     Oddly, this latter critique is confused about the different kinds of ‘mass media’. For example, in a dictionary definition on the subject, John Hartley distinguishes between print, screen, audio and ‘broadcast’ media. Broadcast is therefore equated with whatever might be in some sense ‘live’ throughout a signal radiation apparatus (in O’Sullivan et al., 1994: 172–3). Here Hartley is caught up in a cosmology of media ‘effects’, the study of how the media affect audiences. For example, even in critiquing the idea that the media influence the mass, and arguing that audiences are much more active and intelligent than mass society theory would have us believe, the very prospect of resistance presupposes an effects model.

  6     The Marxist and cultural studies frameworks are primarily interested in the way media are industrially and state regulated.

  7    

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