Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionism, also called social behaviorism, was coined by Herbert Blumer and was developed during the 1920s and the 1930s as a reaction and criticism to stimulus-response theory. Symbolic interactionism posits that our actions in response to symbols are mediated and controlled largely by those same symbols. A person's understanding of and relation to his or her physical or objective reality is mediated by the symbolic environment - the mind, the self, and the society that we have internalized. The meaning we give to signs and symbols define us and the realities that we experience. As we are socialized, culturally agreed upon meanings assume control over our interactions with our environments (Baran and Davis 286, 289).
Framing and Frame Analysis
Framing and frame analysis, introduced by Ervin Goffman in 1974, provides a systematic account of how we use expectations to make sense of everyday life situations and the people in them. According to Goffman, we radically and constantly change the way we define actions, situations, and other persons as we move through time and space. Goffman argued that we do not operate with a fixed or limited set of expectations about social roles, objects, or situations because we have enormous flexibility in using and creating expectations. Goffman also implied that social cues learned from using media could be used to mark the boundaries of social worlds in everyday life (Baran and Davis 298-299).
Goffman used the term frame to refer to a specific set of expectations that are used to make sense of a social situation at a given point in time. According to Goffman, individual frames are like notes on a musical scale - they spread along a continuum from those that structure our most serious and socially significant actions to those that structure trivial and playful actions. We learn how to frame serious actions by first learning frames for playful actions (Baran and Davis 299).
Goffman's theory provides an intriguing way of assessing how media can reinforce and elaborate a dominant public culture. (Baran and Davis 301).
Social Construction of Reality
Social construction of reality assumes that our experience of reality is an ongoing social construction, not something that is only sent, delivered, or otherwise transmitted to a docile public by some authority of elite. This assumption contrasts with mass society theory, which envisioned vast populations living in nightmare realities dominated by demagogues, and limited effects paradigm, which focused on the effective transmission of ideas and information from dominant sources to passive receivers (Baran and Davis 291).
It implied the active audience assumptions where the audience does not just passively take in and store bits of information in mental filing cabinets; they actively process information, reshape it, and store only what serves culturally defined need (Baran and Davis 291).
Critical Cultural Studies Theories
Critical cultural studies have emerged as an important and alternative perspective on the role of media in society. It has its roots in Marxist theory but has been influenced by other perspectives including textual analysis and literary criticism. It argues that mass media could and should be used to guide and to implement constructive social change. Media are typically thought, however, to support the status quo and to interfere with the efforts of social movements to bring about useful social change (Baran and Davis 338).
Unlike other theories, critical cultural studies are explicitly based on a set of social values. These values are use to critique existing social practices and institutions that undermine or marginalize important values. Alternatives to these practices and institutions are offered. In some cases, other critical cultural studies theories are develop to guide useful social change (Baran and Davis 339).
Critical cultural studies view exiting mass media as a cultural industry, one concerned with the manufacture and distribution of cultural commodities. This industry is highly constrained in what it does because profits must be earned if the media are to grow and to survive. Cultural commodities consist of bits of everyday life culture that are lifted out of context, repackaged, and then marketed as news and entertainment. Repackaging typically involves considerable distortion, which in turn fosters many misimpressions about personal identities and the larger social world. Often, these misimpressions provide support for the status quo. Criticism has entered on advertising and political communication. Advertising is said to create unnecessary needs while political communication intrudes into and disrupts politics. Entertainment content distorts our perspective on ourselves and on the social world (Baran and Davis 339).
Unlike earlier schools of Marxist theory, most critical cultural studies theories reject the view that mass media are totally under the control of dominant and well-organized elites who cynically manipulate media content in their own interest. Instead, media are viewed as a public forum in which many groups and people are able to participate. However, elites are seen as enjoying many advantages. Most media content is found to sustain and to support the status quo - even, perhaps especially, when it is under stress or breaking down. Also critical cultural studies theories reject simplistic notions of audience effects like those in mass society theory. Even when media content explicitly supports the status quo, audiences may reject or understand this content. Audience members have been found to engage in oppositional decoding of media content, arriving at interpretations that differ markedly from those intended by message producers (Baran and Davis 339).
