CONTEXTUALIZATION AND RECONTEXTUALIZATION

An important characteristic of ‘media’ research around 2000 has been a

renewed emphasis on the practices of ‘communication.’ Information and

communication technologies support multiple forms of interaction at many levels

of the social structure. Neither theoretically nor empirically can the media be

understood as separate entities – add-ons or plug-ins. Instead, the technological

media are necessary infrastructural resources in maintaining and structuring

modern societies (Giddens 1984; Thompson 1995).

The moments of mutual constitution, concrete interchange, and

structuration may be examined as ‘contexts.’ These contexts extend far beyond

the stages of impact of media on particular audiences.

This chapter reviews selected research traditions which examine the

geographical, technological, institutional, and discursive contexts of media –

linkages between media and the rest of the social structure (even while not all of

these traditions may subscribe to the metatheoretical perspective of ‘contexts’).

The logic of the presentation proceeds from subcultures and communities, via the

nation-state as an essentially modern context that has depended upon print and

broadcast technologies, to issues of transnationalism and postcolonialism. The

final section examines the (still unresolved) status of those social ‘contexts’ which

are established in and of computer media networks. While frequently at odds with

each other in their theoretical and political assumptions, each tradition has been

important in addressing questions of media impact and determination, not at the

level of individual response or socialization, but at the institutional and cultural

levels of social structuration.

From the classic question regarding the relative determination of social life

by either economic, political, or cultural factors, follows the question of how the

media, in particular, affect and respond to their various social contexts. The

distinctive, reflexive function of media may be summed up, first, as

‘contextualization.’ The media relate issues and events in the world to each other,

and allow audiences to contemplate and, perhaps, act upon such relations – with

reference to a specific level or domain of social reality. Second, the media can

serve to ‘recontextualize’ those events and issues, indicating a range of alternative

perspectives and interpretations. With reference to science and politics, Rorty

(1991: 94) has suggested that these institutions perform recontextualizations

which range ‘from instinctive revision of intentions through routine calculation

toward revolutionary science and politics.’ Although Rorty’s position tends to go

overboard in its postmodernist textualization of social issues (for a critique, see

Jensen 1995: 180–185), the concept of recontextualization is helpful if

understood as a concrete activity which both media practitioners and audiences

perform. By contextualizing and recontextualizing the world, the media participate

centrally in maintaining society, and they do so across a variety of settings where

culture is constructed and contested.