mass-communication-theory

Chapter 11 Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World 319
conflict in the Middle East that began in Iraq in 2003, the flag flying over the
twenty-seven-building, $800 million U.S. embassy that opened in 2010 symbolizes
America’s strength and its quest for democracy for all people. But for many who
oppose that conflict, that same flag symbolizes America’s occupation and quest for
empire. Regardless of the meaning we individually attach to our flag, however, we
are not free from its power. When a color guard passes before us at a sporting
event, how free are we to remain sitting? At a school function, how free are we to
continue chatting with our friends during the Pledge of Allegiance to that tricolored
piece of fabric?
PRAGMATISM AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
Mead developed symbolic interactionism by drawing on ideas from pragmatism, as
you may remember from Chapter 4, a philosophical school of theory emphasizing
the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and
controlling it. Pragmatism developed in America as a reaction against ideas gaining
popularity at home and in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century—simplistic
forms of materialism such as behaviorism and German idealism. Both behaviorism
and idealism rejected the possibility of human agency: that individuals could consciously
control their thoughts and actions in some meaningful and useful way
(Chapter 1). Idealism argued that people are dominated by culture, and behaviorism
argued that all human action is a conditioned response to external stimuli.
From the preceding description of Mead’s ideas, you can see how he tried to find
a middle ground between these two perspectives—a place that would allow for
some degree of human agency. If we consider Mead’s arguments carefully, they allow
for individuals to have some control over what they do, but he is really arguing
that agency lies with the community (or in the baseball example, with the
team). Communities create and propagate culture: the complex sets of symbols
that guide and shape our experiences. When we act in communities, we are mutually
conditioned so we learn culture and use it to structure experience. These pragmatist
notions about culture and human agency are at the heart of many of the
cultural theories developed in the United States. As a school of thought, pragmatism
continues to attract interest in a number of disciplines. In philosophy, Richard
Rorty (1991; Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, 1982) has popularized neo-pragmatism.
In political science a number of scholars have advocated John Dewey’s pragmatism
as a way of moving that field in a useful direction (Farr, 1999). In communication,
Chris Russill (2006) and Robert Craig (2007) discuss the ongoing relevance of
pragmatism.
For pragmatists, the basic test of the power of culture is the extent to which it
effectively structures experience within a community. When some aspect of culture
loses its effectiveness, it ceases to structure experience and becomes a set of words
and symbols having essentially no meaning. For example, we can still find certain
words in a dictionary and we could use them to decode old media content, but
they would have no force in our lives—no connection to our experience. What
does “twenty-three skidoo” mean? Do you have “the skinny”? You might understand
these as “let’s split” and “the 411,” respectively. Or maybe not, depending
on your experience. Culture is constantly changing—new elements are developed
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