Social Action Media Studies: Foundational Arguments and Common Premises
Article in Communication Theory 5(2):93 - 116 · March 2006 with 133 Reads
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.1995.tb00100.x
1st Gerard T. Schoening
2nd James A. Anderson
Abstract
Media scholars claiming a “social action” perspective advance their work on the grounds of hermeneutic/interpretive empiricism that privileges ethnographic methods. Such scholarship tends only to allude to its theoretical influences (e.g., symbolic interactionism, phenomenology). In an effort to extrapolate principles by which social action media approaches (or their critiques) can be analyzed, this paper turns to a broad base of philosophical writings in the social action tradition that social action media scholars have identified as seminal influences. Six premises extrapolated from these works direct social science researchers to examine forms of collective signifying behaviors—or routines—through which media content is subsumed and interpreted. How signifying action gets interpreted and performed (and, hence, how “reality” is constructed and sustained) determines the “effects” associated with media content.