CULTURE AND CULTURES
In order to anticipate some familiar problems in defining ‘culture,’ a few
conceptual distinctions are in order. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), by the 1950s,
noted as many as 164 definitions of culture. Similar problems affect
communication studies, where Anderson (1996) has recently identified 249
definitions or theories of communication.
An inclusive, modern definition of culture dates from the Romantic age,
specifically the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (Ideas for a Philosophy of the
History of Mankind, 1784). Culture is that which simultaneously unites and
differentiates human beings (for an overview see Williams 1983). On the one
hand, all human beings share culture – the ability to experience, reproduce, and
communicate meaning. On the other hand, humans can be distinguished
according to the specific meanings with which they align themselves – the cultural
formations to which they ‘belong’ or ‘owe’ their identity and solidarity. While
cultures, in the plural, have traditionally been coupled with particular social
groups in a geographical location, cultures have increasingly come to extend
across space and time with the advent of writing, print, and later communication
technologies. It is this extension, not least, which requires a careful account of the
several cultural contexts in which media are embedded.
An additional complication for media studies arises from the distinction
between culture as product and culture as process (e.g., Jensen 1986: ch. 5).
Culture has been understood, on the one hand, as specific ‘products’ of human
creativity, as ‘containers’ of culture, and often as privileged means of insight for
social elites. With industrialization came a wider range of cultural products which
addressed a mass public, as well. On the other hand, culture has been examined
as a ‘process’ which pervades all of mental and social life. This process was
traditionally understood literally as the cultivation of the human spirit either in a
secular or a religious sense. Increasingly, reference has also been made to the
mundane and lived reality of the everyday.
This last reorientation has itself been associated with the industrialization of
culture during the modern period. Industrialization has entailed a recognition – for
commercial as well as ideal purposes – of popular, informal, and emergent
cultural practices alongside the long-established and institutionalized arts. In
academia, the reorientation has entailed a relativization, in part, of both classical
learning and Western civilization. The relativization has been performed over the
past century most notably by anthropology and, more recently, by research fields
on (mass) communication and (popular) culture. The distinction between culture
as product and as process has nevertheless been persistent, and has challenged
research to conceptualize and operationalize communication in ways that
capture both sides of the cultural coin of exchange.
One implication for media and communication research has been a call,
increasingly, to study not only cultures – in the plural – but cultural contexts of
multiple kinds. These contexts lend themselves to empirical studies as moments
of interchange between media and other social and cultural circumstances,
broadly speaking. Accordingly, in the following reviews, both media production
and reception are taken up as sites of the production of culture. Key issues in
research as well as public debate – concerning cultural identity or authenticity,
and concerning economic and political power – have frequently revolved around
the production–reception nexus. What is the relative determining influence of, for
example, transnational economic infrastructures, national political regulation,
and local cultural formations in the experience and use of mediated
communication? For each of the contexts below, a broad working definition of
culture is adopted: culture has been studied as reproduced, cumulated, and
sedimented structures of meaning. The empirical questions have centered on the
specific contributions the media make to cultural production and social
interaction.
