Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 8

Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 10 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A Locating Media in Cultural Theories and raised a new set of issues. Although the study of media remains a problem that is not highly congenial to the original training of analysts in certain areas, recent publications on the cultural impacts of media demonstrate the extent to which the attention given to the topic has substantially expanded the research potential. Another reason for the growing concern about the position of theory in media research arises from the predominantly heuristic status of the analytic constructs on media. From the classic dictum about the centrality of media as the component of message to Hepp’s mediatization, media studies have been in search of a methodically viable theory. This need has been partially met with pragmatic, but often short-lived, alliances with socio-cultural theories. While concerned with case studies of media, research is affected by a constant pull from micro-level ethnographic foci. Sensitive to this immanent onus, empirical case studies justify themselves as part of the collective processes within which tasks of the discipline are located. From this perspective, Hepp’s mediatization may not be a theory on media practice but, rather, akin to a paradigmatic revision for deduction of a generalized diagnosis about the state of culture. An awareness of the imminent collective inheres in Hepp’s views (and to a large extent in Couldry’s) on the impact of media on culture, but it leaves little room for the unthought, giving priority to the discovery of normative workings of how culture may transmute through mediatization. The following discussion relates to the question raised earlier: Why are conventional theoretical frameworks insufficient for media? Th e effort here is much less than an attempt to seek an alternative: If theories are useful for explaining why media often trigger the unexpected, leading us to unthought of theories, are they not of some use for illuminating the locale of the other in media? I hope that this paradoxical overture to failure, if acceptable, justifies an attempt to delve into theories to capture some of the haunting shadows that elude premeditated schemes of analysis. The critique of the characteristically relative status of theories mobilized in media analysis supports my postulate. Couldry argues for the need for an inherently iconoclastic stance on theories applied to media analysis. He calls for socially oriented theory in media study. Couldry modifies the importance attached to subjects in conventional media studies, “media considered as objects, texts, apparatuses of perception or production process”, and highlights the practice as an alternative. Couldry writes that “a practical approach to media frames its questions, by reference to what people are doing in relation to media”. 4 This assumes that media affect the ways that people relate to the 4 Nick Couldry, Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice , Polity Press, UK, p. 35. world through active reciprocity rather than in isolation as autonomous instruments. The task is to detect the sociological significance of media by reference to its impacts in use. Couldry’s claim about the relevance of looking at practice, rather than “audience”, seems reasonable for social scientists who approach people as regenerating actors based on their reflexive mediation. First, in the light of the analytic potential that audience research promises, this claim is audacious in the notion that practice presupposes an autonomous formation derived from actions. When applying practice theories, analysts invoke subjects while being forced to contextualize them in a social context that often denies their potential. Couldry’s departure from field-level raw reality reflects the post-modernist notion of agency, against the prevailing image of media as the dominant power. Ethnographic studies of audience in the “non- west” have proven that theories deduced from specialized disciplines are useful for exposing generalized patterns of cultural modernity among those who face media in non-western contexts. But then, why discuss mediatization? The problems, if any, stem from the fundamental axiom to be followed in the execution of the theory in question. If the metaphor of the subject being entangled by the web of culture à la Geertz applies to the mediatized west, we will see how practice perspectives simultaneously set media research on diverse analytical strategies. But this leads to our second thought about Couldry. As we will see, media practices elude fixated analytic frameworks, instead manifesting in the forms of the collective, which are tendentiously ephemeral. This tendency manifests itself in dialectics of mechanical reproductions of cultural practice and the collective but highly subjective consequences that ensue illogically, often in no premeditated fashion. Indeed, as recent publications on media demonstrate, ethnographic micro-sociology promises viable approaches to media, potentially opening a rich analytic horizon. Nevertheless, by allowing us to examine the consequences of media to the lives of receivers, it generates problems of its own, i.e., the contingent unpremeditated specificities of media culture arising from the field-level investigation of a particular social group or community. One of these concerns the outcomes of social processes triggered by agents that are not easily objectified in sociological terms. If actors generate sociological reality by doing something in relation to media, how do they mutate the consequence of localized perspectives in collective forms? Couldry making reference to the sociology of Durkheim, suggests the symbolic dimension of social facts, and anticipates the use of practice for the exploration of sociologic phenomena in the late modern period. Couldry argues that the practice perspective based on classical sociologic thinking should not be circumscribed in semiotics. Then, what is the