New Trends in TheorizingMedia Communication

Thomas A. Bauer

University of Vienna

Guestlecture at Fudan University School of Journalism

Dec 09

www.thomasbauer.at

change of paradigms in communication science

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• from communication science to communication studies:The subject of communication science is not communication (cognitivism / ontologism / behaviourism/ essentialisms)but how the society considers communication - (reflexive-constructive perspective: observation of observation

• from analyzing communication to understanding communication phenomena: interpretative paradigm, exemplary understanding

• from structure-view of communication to culture-view of society(cultural studies , discourse analysis )

• cultural turn:from social science to cultural science ( new conceptualization of social theory as grounded theory, Cultural Studies as a theoretical perspective

streams as versions of the cultural turn

• constructivist paradigm:the world of reality is constructed through observation and exchange of meaning of observation

• practice-paradigm:in the centre of research is the assumption, that there is a special relation between social practice and collective schemes of knowledge and interpretation (knowledge as a category of practice, not of truth – based on phenomenology, , structuralism, ling. Philos. Wittgenstein)

• autopoiesis-paradigm:cognitive systems create an observer-related reality by applying meanings (sense) to environmental stimuli.the radical constructivism does not create a theory of acting, but a theory of cognition (construction of cognitive systems)

• text-paradigm:

the social-cultural world are connections (system) of symbols /signs, which reproduce themselves in discourses. The socio-cultural world appears as a text, as an symbolic order, which do not depict connections, but which create objectives and connections.

cultural turn in theorizing communication

• on the level of epistemology: constructivist theory of notionconstructivist knowledge-sociology (critiques of theory of reflection) scientific theories are symbolic orders, they produce meanings

• on the level of methodology: hermeneutics & ethno-methodologyfrom quantitative methods to qualitative methods. The symbolic structure of social world demands interpretative methods – not only consideration or observation, but understanding of sense

• on the level of social theory: grounded theory & phenomenologythe attention goes to the cultural constitution of social milieus, their models of creating and generating meanings,to the question of how models of sense are generated(cf. Symbolic politics: the social world (realtions9 is constituted by symbolic orders, by collective models of meanings: sense is not a norm or a purpose to do something, but is creating and sharing meanings – only communication makes world meaningful

• on the level of research interests: theory as the break of everyday routinesnew questions relate to three streams:

cultural turn in theorizing media

• critiques on essentialist theory: media as a technical or organizational mechanism

the plausibility of nature-science-models (formal languages) has used out: objectivity, causality, normativity, mathematicity, technicity, mechanicity – as too weak models of explanation for a complex phenomenon

• media as a contextual model of use of infrastructure

media is not an item in between of partners, but is an agreement on a setting of relation, an intrinsic negotiation within symbolic interaction

• Media as an agency (passage) of social practice

media is a connection of social action and social observation, a frame of supposition of general knowledge and through that a reference of social habitus in media society

• from media to mediality

Media defines the character of communication as communication is done in the model of media: mediality and/or mediatization is the relevant phenomenon