Power, Pleasure, Patterns: Intersecting Narratives of Media Influence

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Power, Pleasure, Patterns: Intersecting
Narratives of Media Influence
Joshua Meyrowitz
Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824
doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00406.x
In a classic joke of observer bias, scientists of different nationalities studying rats
‘‘discover’’ in the rats the behavioral traits associated with the stereotypical conceptions
of the scientists’ own nationalities. One group of scientists sees the rats operating in
organized hierarchies, another group of scientists sees the rats responding to the
impulses of the moment, yet another group of scientists sees the rats engaging in
creative long-term adaptations to the environments in which they are placed, and
so on. Each group of scientists sees what its members already ‘‘know’’ to be the nature
of mammalian life. Each has difficulty seeing what the other groups of scientistsobserve.
The humor in such anecdotes typically fades, of course, for any scholars who are
asked to consider the possibility that their own research is similarly shaped and
limited by preconceptions of the subject at hand. Yet, this process probably underlies
all ways of knowing about human communication. My focus in this article is on the
manner in which something analogous to the examination of rats in the different
scientists’ laboratories has been operating in the study of media in different research
camps. In observing (or imagining) a family watching television news, for example,
different media analysts see different forces at work. One research camp sees a family
being subjected to a dominant ideological ‘‘text’’ (to which they may succumb or
develop oppositional or negotiated ‘‘readings’’). Another research camp sees a family
actively employing media for useful and pleasurable ends, such as surveillance of
their world, exposure to sample interpretations of social events, anticipatory social-
ization for the children, and shared topics for conversation. Yet another research
camp focuses less on the content of the news program or the motivations of the
viewers than on the medium-afforded structure of the interaction—that is, on how
television, more easily than newspapers, includes family members of different ages
and genders in the same experience at the same time. And so on.
Like the rat-observing scientists, many scholars who describe the ‘‘obvious’’
nature of such interactions with media have difficulty appreciating, or sometimes
even comprehending, what other media observers see. Yet, there is a good case to be
made that fuller understandings of human interactions with media, as with the
Corresponding author: Joshua Meyrowitz; e-mail: joshua.meyrowitz@unh.edu
The research for this article was conducted as part of a larger project supported by a fellowship
from the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire.
Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916
Journal of Communication 58 (2008) 641–663 ª2008 International Communication Association 641
journal of
COMMUNICATION

behavior of rats, could be generated from broadening the observational frames, even
to the point of employing a range of perspectives that, on the surface at least, appear
to be contradictory. In a preliminary pursuit of that goal, this article analyzes three
narratives of human experience that I argue underlie three different ways of studying
media influence: critical/cultural studies, uses and gratifications research, and
medium theory. This manner of categorizing media studies is neither exhaustive
nor universal. Yet, it offers a useful model for demonstrating how seemingly incom-
patible research perspectives could do a better job of learning from each other.
Broadly speaking, the critical/cultural studies approach views media as sites
of (and weapons in) struggles over social, economic, symbolic, and political power
(as well as struggles over control of, and access to, the media themselves); the uses
and gratifications approach views media as some of the means through which people
actively and consciously attempt to meet their personal and social needs and desires;
and medium theory sees each communication technology as having material reality
that—like climate and geographical features—interacts with human bodies and
institutions to foster some interactional possibilities and discourage others. I will
argue that each of these approaches is built on a broader ‘‘story’’ about human
experience, a story that begins long before the use of modern media but in which
media then come to play a predictable part. Each narrative, though simple in form,
offers an enticing conceptual setting for explorations of media that has been fruitfully
exploited. Each narrative holds valuable insights for the other two approaches. Yet,
the resulting research agendas have usually excluded each other.
After analyzing the root narratives that underlie these three research traditions,
I will offer a sample topic that highlights each narrative’s special explanatory
strength, thereby suggesting that, for some media issues, members of each camp
should consider that their own typical perspective is not as valuable as the perspec-
tive embraced by another camp. To conclude, I will describe two sample topics that
clearly benefit from analyses based on all three perspectives.
Fragmentation in approaches to media
Critical/cultural studies, uses and gratifications, and medium theory are among the
frameworks that have developed as reactions against the earlier mass communication
models that predicted simplistic short-term responses to media stimuli, usually in
the form of imitation or persuasion. The space for these newer models grew as it
became clearer that the stimulus-response concept (even when refined through
studies of individual and group differences in response to messages and even when
explored in terms of the modulating influence of the opinions of influential peers)
did not sufficiently account for the complexity of interactions with media. Each of
these more sophisticated approaches has led to a major edifice of research and
theory. In the process, the communication discipline has both gained and lost.
We have gained rich and textured terrains of media scholarship that have each filled
dozens of journals and scores of books, exposed students of media to thoughtful and
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provocative arguments that extend far beyond the popular discourses about media,
and provided meaningful, lifelong careers to hundreds of scholars. And yet, the
earlier relative coherence in studies about media has been lost. It is not simply that
different media research camps disagree with each other; that was true from the start.
It is rather that the current subareas of media exploration rarely even engage in
extensive debate and respectful discussion with each other. Indeed, a look through
the citations and bibliographies in articles and books about interactions with media
suggests that each of these three research traditions has become a de facto subdisci-
pline of media study. The ‘‘must-cite’’ figures in one subarea are typically absent in
the references in the other subareas, except when they are being critiqued (I confess
that this has been true in much of my work as well). The different camps rarely even
acknowledge each other’s existence, except to ritualistically dismiss the other
approaches. Each camp has built walls around itself that isolate it from other camps.
These boundaries keep insiders in and outsiders out. Members of each of these
subdisciplines of media research tend to act as if their camp has the one ‘‘true’’
approach, which leads them to turn their focus inward. Criticisms from outside,
rather than encouraging openings to alternative approaches, tend to lead to
enhanced fortifications. Disciples are trained to carry on the faith and defend it from
heretics. Probing questions from neophytes are greeted with exhortations to read
more deeply into the founding ‘‘holy’’ texts or more recent exegeses of them.
Although many interesting extended media debates and discussions still occur, they
are usually bounded debates in the sense that they tend to occur within groups that
share basic worldviews about media. As a result, many major assumptions are left
unquestioned and unchallenged, and each research camp tends to insulate itself from
the possibility of learning from the other camps. Even when some crisis of faith
within a research camp occurs—such as when there is a sense of hitting a conceptual
dead end or being unable to explain some significant social phenomenon—adher-
ents tend to search for the solutions deeper within their own faith’s narrative
of origin, rather than by looking outward to the potential contributions of the
other camps.
In effect, then, these three media research camps often function like tall towers
with thick walls and small windows that afford only limited glances at the other
structures. The openings are large enough to take some potshots at the other edifices,
with nodding approval from one’s tower mates, but too narrow for meaningful
engagement with those who might actually expose cracks in the foundations or walls
of one’s beliefs. Some researchers, to be sure, have tried to break down the distinc-
tions. Katz (1987), for example, points out that there is more of a shared heritage
among perspectives than is typically acknowledged. Alasuutari (1999) heralds
the trend toward ‘‘third-generation’’ audience studies that could close some of the
methodological gaps between uses and gratifications and cultural studies. Some
scholars have managed to string precarious rope bridges, or build stronger struc-
tures, to at least one of the other research towers (e.g., Grosswiler, 1998; Jenkins,
2006; Livingstone, in press; Poster, 2006). A few have even managed to be recognized
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as at least partial members of all three research camps (one thinks, e.g., of the late
James Carey, whose eclecticism and geniality allowed him to cross through the
territorial checkpoints with atypical ease). Yet, for the most part, those who attempt
to squeeze through the windows to reach out toward one of the other towers still
confront the daunting risk of crashing to the ground where they become novices
again, faced with a steep climb toward mastery of a new set of literature, theories,
assumptions, methods, and terminology that was functionally nonexistent from the
perspective of their initial research camp. Rather than being praised for their intel-
lectual openness, such adventurers may face reproachful critiques from their original
colleagues, who often treat those who choose to explore new theoretical terrains as
traitors or apostates who are no longer as welcome, or trusted, at the home camp.
Similarly, their new associates often find the immigrant’s original orientations puz-
zling and sometimes threatening. Whether such wandering scholars are welcomed
into the new territory as converts or treated with lingering suspicion, there is a pal-
pable sense that significant boundaries have been crossed.
In the context of fragmented and usually well-defended territories of media
research, there are relatively few attempts to draw on multiple perspectives across
research camps, even when they might be very relevant to the topic at hand. Our
understanding of media could be enhanced if more researchers in each camp were
open to rethinking their foundational assumptions in light of the assumptions
underlying the other approaches.
Digging up root narratives
It would be impossible in a short article to summarize all the work that has developed
in critical/cultural studies, uses and gratifications, and medium theory. Moreover,
standard literature reviews would be counterproductive in terms of my objective
because they would likely reaffirm the boundaries that separate the approaches, while
also highlighting the divisions that splinter them internally. Instead, I will attempt to
look beneath each research edifice to a foundational narrative about human exis-
tence on which that edifice appears to have been built. Each of these root narratives
tells a relatively simple story. Each story incorporates assumptions about human
nature and emphasizes particular dimensions of human experience. Each narrative
provides a different way of answering the question ‘‘What do media do to us or for
us?’’ Most significantly, each story—at least in its broad dimensions—is obviously
true, and yet obviously incomplete. When dug up, then, the tangles of roots for the
three narratives may be less protected from intersection with each other than the tall,
imposing, and thick-walled structures that have grown from each cluster of roots.
Indeed, when one looks to the insights one can gain from taking each root narrative
seriously, the attacks on media research camps that are based on critiques of their
practitioners’ particular writing styles, or research methods, or overstated claims
become less relevant.
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The three root narratives could be called the power and resistance narrative,the
purposes and pleasures narrative,andthestructures and patterns narrative.Yet,for
brevity and practical simplicity, I will usually refer to them, respectively, as the
power, pleasure, and patterns narratives. I use the term power to summarize the
root narrative for the critical/cultural studies approach, I use the term pleasure
to refer to the root narrative underlying the uses and gratifications approach
(choosing that term over the blander ‘‘purposes’’ to offset it more starkly from
‘‘power’’), and I use the term patterns to summarize the medium-theory approach.
Of course, no one research camp can claim exclusive dominion over the concepts
suggested by each of these terms, as discussed in more detail later, which reinforces
my argument that the three research perspectives have many implicit and under-
lying interconnections.
The power and resistance narrative
One key foundational narrative about human existence is that life is a power struggle.
In this story, which begins thousands of years ago, it is assumed that competition for
resources is a basic element of most human societies. Among hunter-gatherers, for
example, social groups struggled over access to land and game. After the growth of
agriculture, competition expanded for an increasingly complex array of resources,
both material and symbolic. In this perspective, conflict is a ‘‘natural’’ feature of both
intergroup and intragroup relations. Although the types of contested resources
change with social and economic evolution, struggles for dominance and power
remain constant across social forms. As an outcome of such struggles, inequalities
among humans develop in access to resources such as land, food, water, shelter,
livestock, tools, weapons, skills, knowledge, education, modes of transportation, and
the labor of others. In most instances, those with more access to resources use their
relative advantage to increase the inequalities.
The power narrative highlights the tendency for those who dominate to create
a symbolic universe that naturalizes their domination, both for themselves and for
those who are being subjugated. Whereas early humans established dominance
through brute force, more complex ideological forces now serve the same function.
Within a social system of inequality, there are many inducements for those sub-
jugated to embrace the structures that subjugate them, including physical threats and
punishments, as well as rewards. Acceptance of lower status also has psychological
benefits, such as the relative peace of mind that comes from accepting one’s situation
rather than engaging constantly in struggles that are difficult, or perhaps impossible,
to win. The symbolic system of domination, then, is more potent, efficient, and
effective than physical power alone. As a result, the weak—with so many fewer
behavioral and symbolic options than the powerful—become complicit in their
own subjugation, and the frequency with which the dominant classes need to employ
raw power diminishes. Yet, there are also natural impulses, both conscious and
unconscious, for those of lower status to oppose those who dominate them and to
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struggle to enhance their own positions. The less powerful, therefore, develop a range
of strategies of accommodation and resistance and sometimes outright rebellion.
The power narrative embraces a wide range of historical and contemporary
themes, social structures, and activities, including slavery and all secular and reli-
gious hierarchies such as monarchies and priesthoods. In the political–economic
sphere, this narrative locates the origin of the most egregious and most intractable
forms of power in large-scale capitalism and such developments as the expansion of
long-distance trade by Europeans in the 16th century. The unequal benefit to the
trading parties in merchant capitalism developed into more extreme forms of exploi-
tation via colonialism and imperialism, through which ‘‘core’’ regions subjugated the
peoples of ‘‘peripheral’’ regions and extracted their resources for the core regions’
enrichment (Wallerstein, 1974). Similarly, the power narrative highlights how cap-
italist industrial production within both core and peripheral regions relies on sys-
tems of inequality in which the vast majority of populations are denied direct access
to the tools and resources (such as land) they would need for their own support,
which leads to their willingness to sell their labor to factory owners for less than its
full economic value (Wolf, 1997). The depletion and pollution of the environment
for corporate profit are also described within the power narrative, as is the current
global expansion of ‘‘neoliberal’’ policies that privatize basic social services and
typically increase poverty and inequality. The power narrative is central in critiques
of so-called ‘‘free trade’’ agreements, which undermine subsistence agriculture and
communal ownership of land and force third-world peoples into a global economic
system that enriches the few at the expense of the many while also weakening or
destroying indigenous cultures. Within contemporary societies, the power narrative
has highlighted inequalities that exist among classes and ethnic groups and between
men and women.
Those who embrace the power narrative tend to look at media in predictable
ways. Media are both weapons in and sites of conflict in struggles over access to
resources, wealth, information, symbolic representations, and power—and over
access to the media themselves. Because the media-power story is about struggles
that have very high stakes, it is not surprising that those who have grappled with
media power have also often battled among themselves over who has the ‘‘correct’’
approach. Here, I purposely gloss over those differences in order to highlight what
unites most media-power scholars, as well as what separates them from those work-
ing within other media narratives.
Marx and Engels (1932/1964) laid the foundation for the media-power narrative
in the mid-19th century when they described how those who control material pro-
duction (the economic ‘‘base’’) also tend to control ‘‘mental production’’ (the
cultural ‘‘superstructure’’). While in prison from 1929 to 1935 for his opposition
to Mussolini’s fascist government, Gramsci (1971) worked to explain why the masses
who are oppressed by the privileged few do not revolt against their oppressors.
Gramsci analyzed how the press, in combination with many other hegemonic social
institutions such as schools and the Church, served to legitimize the ruling ideology
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and diminish impulses of resistance among the populace. The media-power narra-
tive was extended by the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/1976) of
the Frankfurt School. In the 1940s, they attacked the ‘‘culture industry,’’ which they
saw as producing a top-down system of ideology that was conveyed through the mass
media and whose surface variety concealed an underlying homogeneity. In their
view, the accessible pleasures of popular culture (in contrast to high culture) dis-
tracted the masses from their social and economic marginalization, making them
passive and docile.
The power narrative has been extended and modified in more contemporary
analyses of the political economy of the mass media. These studies explore how the
patterns of media ownership, financing, and control usually shape and limit the
content and uses of media (McChesney, 2004). Similarly, those engaged in critical
analysis of news—a related subfield that has blossomed since the 1970s and 1980s—
look at journalistic practices that belie the claims that ‘‘we don’t make the news, we
just report it’’ or that journalism is a simple empirical task of reporting the who,
what, when, where, why, and how of events. Critical news analysis reveals the over-
whelming tendency of mainstream journalism to amplify the views and voices of the
powerful (Manoff & Schudson, 1986). In general, the power narrative argues con-
vincingly that media institutions that are owned and financed by giant corporate
conglomerates and are heavily invested in capitalist globalized economics are
unlikely to encourage forms of news or entertainment that undermine their own
profit-driven activities or question the overall logic of commodification and the
accumulation of wealth. The corporate media’s paltry coverage of the debates over
their own deregulation and increased conglomeration from the 1980s to the present
illustrates that concern.
The field of cultural studies, which has expanded rapidly since the 1970s and
1980s after its initiation in the 1950s and 1960s, maintains the focus on power but
rejects the determinist tendencies in orthodox Marxism and the Frankfurt School.
Cultural studies scholars argue that people are not passive ‘‘cultural dopes’’ who are
wholly manipulated by capitalism and media. Cultural studies scholars distinguish
between the dominant ‘‘encodings’’ of media texts and the variety of ‘‘decodings’’ by
the public (Hall, 1980). Audience reception studies within cultural studies add
details about the ways in which audiences resist and oppose power by ‘‘reading’’
media ‘‘texts’’ differently and ‘‘negotiating’’ meanings that bear on struggles for
legitimation and authority (Fiske, 1987). Cultural studies research explores multiple
dimensions of power, including media representations of class, race, ethnicity, and
gender. Such work has highlighted how the media, and popular culture in general,
function more as contested domains, rather than unchallenged or deterministic tools
of the powerful. More recent work in cultural studies has moved beyond studying
particular texts and audiences to focus more broadly on the implications of living in
societies—and a globe—dominated by powerful media institutions that influence
daily rituals and conceptions of reality, attempt to construct identities, and convey
the sense of the centrality of the ‘‘media world’’ as it differs from ‘‘ordinary life’’
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(Couldry, 2003; Morley & Robins, 1995). Aggressively antidisciplinary and topically
diffuse, cultural studies scholarship examines a variety of contradictory ways in
which people are disempowered and empowered by all the forces and structures
that organize their lives (Grossberg, 1997). While eschewing reductionist concep-
tions of power, cultural studies scholars nevertheless focus on historically situated
economic, political, and symbolic forces of empowerment and disempowerment
within advanced, and increasingly globalized, capitalism (Erni, 2001).
The media-power story is generally embraced and articulated by scholars who are
critical of what they see as various forms of social domination and who want to
reduce subjugation. Many members of this research camp vociferously attack those
who, in approaching media from other narratives, tend to ignore or downplay media
power. Uses and gratifications researchers and medium theorists, for example, are
often critiqued by critical/cultural studies scholars as being the dupes or de facto
agents of the powerful. Media-power scholars also often clash with each other.
Indeed, the ‘‘war’’ between those engaging in cultural studies (with a typical focus
on consumption and reception of media artifacts) and those engaged in political–
economic critiques of the media (with a typical focus on ownership and control of
media production) has become legendary (Durham & Kellner, 2001, p. 23). Another
battle has raged between those reception scholars who focus mostly on the power of,
and resistance to, dominant media encodings and ‘‘preferred readings’’ (Hall, 1980)
and those who focus on the power of audience members to create their own mean-
ings through the ‘‘semiotic democracy’’ afforded by polysemic texts (Fiske, 1987).
Yet, underlying most of the subthreads of the media-power narrative are compatible
attempts to improve the human condition by creating a more harmonious, egalitar-
ian, just, and democratic world. The differences within the media-power camp, as
large as they may seem to be for those engaged in the internal struggles, pale in
comparison with the contrast between the power story and the other two narratives
recounted here.
The purposes and pleasures narrative
Another root narrative that has fed the growth of media research is the story of
people as active, conscious, and purposeful users of the human, material, and sym-
bolic resources with which they come into contact or create. In this story, humans
use features of their environment and each other’s presence to meet their individual
and collective needs and desires for food, shelter, social interaction, sex and repro-
duction, play, aesthetic experience, cultural transmission, amusement, and relaxa-
tion. Even early humans, like other animals, could distinguish between a location
that provided good shelter from wind and rain (such as a cave) and a location that
provided poor shelter (such as an open field). Similarly, humans select the right
stones to kill small animals or use for other purposes. Humans learn to distinguish
between berries that are sweet and those that are sour, between animals whose flesh
is tasty to eat (and whose skins and bones serve other uses) and those that are better
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left alone or used for other purposes. Humans have greater capacity than other
animals to make choices about how to exploit their environment. Moreover, humans
have the remarkable ability to think about and describe how and why they make the
choices they make, as well as to convey their strategies and thoughts to their children
and descendants. Humans learn and pass on the skills of making fires for cooking as
well as warmth and of sowing seeds and harvesting crops. They take pleasure in
sharing stories and song. Within this narrative, humans are not seen as the victims of
each other or of their environment but rather as rational and purposeful agents who
work, individually and collectively, to choose among available options to best meet
their perceived personal and social needs.
The pleasure narrative sees humans as creators of tools to meet various needs,
including the ‘‘tools’’ of human association, art, architecture, myth, religion, and
other forms of creativity to serve individual and shared goals. Systems and institu-
tions are created to meet demands and are modified to enhance their match to
human needs and enjoyments. Interactions with others are seen as possessing poten-
tial for mutual satisfaction, rather than always being based on a process through
which some people benefit from the exploitation of others. Whether looking at
mating, employment, trade, or markets, those who embrace the purposes and plea-
sure narrative see the basic need for some mutual adjustment and accommodation.
Despite inevitable tensions and power differences, spouses must adapt in some ways
to each other’s needs and desires, and they must cooperate for some common goals
(such as producing and socializing children). Indeed, members of any group or
society must coordinate activities to assure some level of stability and meet collective
needs for shelter, food, and defense. Similarly, sellers and buyers and traders of goods
within and across societies often engage in practices that address—at least partially—
the needs and desires of all involved.
As with the power narrative, those who embrace the pleasure narrative also find
a predictable role for media. Rather than seeing audiences as targets of media—who
may be victimized by, or resistant to, the barrages of the powerful—the pleasure
narrative sees audiences as active choosers and users of media who select among
media (and nonmedia) options to best meet their personal and social desires and
needs. Within this perspective, media systems strive to please discriminating
audiences.
Activities that predated media are the implicit analogues for many media pur-
poses and pleasures. If our human ancestors climbed up hills or trees to survey their
surroundings, then people today are likely to use media to surveil the social and
physical terrains of the more complex societies of which they are now members.
If humans scouted their area for food options and watched their elders to learn their
group’s traditional means of preparing food, they will scout supermarket ads for
food options at local markets and read cookbooks or recipe Web sites for guidance
on food preparation. If humans once gathered around fires to enjoy a shared expe-
rience and exchange stories, with the exact shape of the flames being irrelevant, then
media experiences will be used as real or virtual gathering places for friends and
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families and a source of shared topics of conversation, where the particular content
of the flickering images on a video screen may take a secondary place. If oral stories
provided children of ancient societies with a glimpse of the roles they might assume
in the future, children will similarly use media today (with or without the encour-
agement of their parents) for anticipatory socialization. If rituals relieved members of
early societies of constant decisions, ritualistic media use today can provide similar
activities of relaxation and escapism, with a welcome suspension of the need for
judgment and decision making.
The uses and gratifications approach came to the fore in the 1970s (Blumler &
Katz, 1974) but built on earlier foundations in motivational psychology and
Maslow’s (1943) theory of a ‘‘hierarchy of needs’’ and ‘‘self-actualization.’’ Herzog
(1941) is often seen as a media-gratifications pioneer through her research that
found that women enjoyed listening to radio soap operas for emotional release,
vicarious experience, and social learning. Berelson’s (1949) study of what regular
readers of newspapers felt they were missing during a newspaper strike gave further
support for the notion of an active audience. Schramm’s (1954) ‘‘fraction of selec-
tion’’ thesis stated that people will give preference to those media offerings that have
the highest expectation of reward for the effort required. Katz (1959) called for
studying the motivations of audiences as a further foundation for the uses and
gratifications approach. Wright (1960) built on the earlier functionalist work of
Lazersfeld, Lasswell, and Merton to offer a ‘‘formula’’ for studying mass communi-
cation in terms of functions and dysfunctions, both manifest and latent, of news
(surveillance), editorials (correlation), cultural transmission, and entertainment—as
they operate for the society, subgroups, individual, and cultural systems. Subsequent
theory in this tradition has greatly expanded the list of gratifications sought. Katz,
Gurevitch, and Haas (1973), for example, describe 35 needs that fall into five cate-
gories: cognitive (such as acquiring information, knowledge, and understanding),
affective (such as gaining a pleasant, emotional, or aesthetic experience), personal
needs that integrate cognitive and affective elements (such as enhancing confidence,
credibility, or stability), social needs that integrate the cognitive and the affective
(such as maintaining or enhancing connections with family and friends), and tension
release (such as diversion or escape). In addition to many other proposed categories,
uses and gratifications research has addressed more dimensions of the gratifications
process, such as the social and psychological origins of various perceived ‘‘needs,’’ the
‘‘expectations’’ that arise for satisfying needs, how the same type of media experience
may meet different needs for different types of people, and how the various forms of
exposure to media (or engagement in other activities) satisfy (or do not satisfy) par-
ticular needs, and how interactions with media often have other (mostly unintended)
consequences (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974).
Because members of the public are seen as conscious and goal-oriented users of
media within this perspective, those things that uses and gratifications researchers
hope to learn can be discovered through surveys or interviews with the public. These
data include the gratifications people say they actually obtain from media, as
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contrasted with the gratifications they seek. The initiative to link the gratification of
need with media choices is seen as resting with the audience. The media are seen as
competing with each other—and with nonmediated activities—to satisfy audience
needs and desires. Within this view, the media industries, rather than acting as
dominating forces, are partners or even, in some ways, the servants of the public.
The purposes and pleasures narrative tells a logical and important story. Yet, it
typically ignores the valuable insights about constraints on the range of people’s
choices, as described in one way by the power and resistance narrative outlined
earlier, and as depicted in a very different way by the structures and patterns narra-
tive outlined in the next section.
The structures and patterns narrative
A third narrative of human existence that has fostered the growth of a key branch of
media scholarship is the story of how the character of human life is shaped signi-
ficantly by the overall structure of the natural and human-made environment in
which people find themselves. The most fundamental ‘‘environment’’ in which
humans exist is their own biological makeup, which affords many possibilities and
yet also sets basic limits. Material and technological extensions of the human senses
and limbs, however, can alter humans’ abilities, thereby encouraging some new
forms of human activity and discouraging others.
Humans have the capacity for many different forms of culture and social orga-
nization, yet not every pattern can exist in every environment. Climate and terrain
have major influences on modes of subsistence, which in turn shape human diet,
mobility, and settlement patterns, forms of social and political organization, dwelling
types, production, art, and ritual—all which have influence on each other. No known
society engages in intensive agriculture in arctic regions, for example.
Before advances in transportation technologies, humans obviously were more
likely to eat fish if they lived near rivers, lakes, or oceans than if they lived far away
from bodies of water. Humans were more likely to hunt and eat large game animals if
large game animals were present in their local environments. Moreover, if the herds
of animals traveled to different locations in winter and summer, the hunters were
likely also to have different summer and winter camps or settlements. Most rivers
encourage travel on them, rather than perpendicular to them or through dense
jungles that grow around tropical rivers. Moreover, the direction and strength of
the flow of the river affects which direction of travel on it is easier and faster. The
fertile banks along some rivers foster intensive agriculture, whereas the soils on the
banks of other rivers do not. Although humans are free to ignore what is easily
available and to work to override restrictions on what is not easily available, the
natural environment tends to encourage some patterns of activity, settlement, diet,
social organization, and political structure while discouraging other patterns. Arid
climates, for example, are more likely to lead to small, relatively egalitarian bands
of hunter-gatherers who move to other camps when they have depleted the locally
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available wild plants and game. At the other extreme, fertile soils facilitate intensive
agriculture that can support large, sedentary populations. The larger size of the
population and the surplus production of food in fertile regions encourage more
complex division of labor, bureaucracy, and hierarchy.
The environment that humans interact with and respond to also includes human
innovations, such as fire harnessed for cooking and for producing ceramics or
metallurgy, domestication of animals, tools, forms of housing, modes of transpor-
tation, and other features of culture. These too are encouraged or constrained by the
structure of the larger environment, just as they also tend to become encouraging
and constraining environments in themselves. Pre-Columbian Mexicans invented
the wheel, but they employed it only as a toy, because their terrain was mountainous
and rocky (Harris & Johnson, 2007, p. 61). In other geographical locations, wheeled
travel expanded trade and transport, just as larger and sturdier boats facilitated more
distant journeys across bodies of water.
Once created and passed down to the next generations through reciprocal typ-
ification, habitualization, and institutionalization, human-made environments are
not that easily or quickly changed, and those born into societies tend to see both
physical realities and socially institutionalized patterns of behavior as equally real
and unchangeable (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Although children have the capacity
to learn any language, for example, they almost always learn the language spoken by
the adults around them.
For those who draw on the structures and patterns narrative, media also play
a predictable part. The systems of communication, once in place, are seen as part of
the material and symbolic environment that creates certain possibilities and encour-
ages certain forms of interaction while discouraging others. This perspective is most
associated with medium theory (Meyrowitz, 1994) and the closely related field of
media ecology (Strate, 2006). Medium theorists analyze the differences among com-
munication environments.
Oral cultures, for example, are seen as having a different social structure from
writing cultures, and each subsequent development in communication form is seen to
have its own additional influence. Oral cultures are heavily dependent on local mem-
ory and repetition for the preservation of ideas; writing, in contrast, ‘‘opens’’ the
culture to more complex and novel concepts and larger territories of shared knowl-
edge. Moreover, different types of writing have different influences. Carvings on stone,
for example, are more difficult to revise and more difficult to transport over great
distances. Stone hieroglyphics tend to last for a long time, preserving cultural state-
ments in a rather fixed form, but they do not facilitate political control over large
territories. Writings on papyrus and paper, in contrast, can be transported more easily
over longer distances, yet their relatively transient nature can lead to more instability.
Writings systems that have thousands of difficult-to-master symbols are more
likely to foster social inequalities than writing systems that have a limited number of
symbols and are relatively easy to master. Similarly, writing systems, no matter how
basic, typically require more stages of learning to decode them than do
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representational pictorial systems, such as photography or video. Just as the nature of
a physical terrain (flat vs. mountainous) or the requirements of a mode of trans-
portation (walking vs. a large boat or a motorized vehicle) may make it easier or
more difficult for people of different ages and abilities to move on their own, so does
the nature of the medium make it easier or more difficult for people of different ages
and abilities to employ it. Children, for example, need to be assisted for many years
through the rough terrain of reading and writing, while they can usually ‘‘travel’’
mostly on their own at an early age through telephone conversations or television
viewing. The media-patterns approach suggests, therefore, that the influences of
a medium such as television—which speaks in a human voice and presents images
that look a lot like ‘‘reality’’—must be understood not merely in relation to the
power dimensions or desirability of its messages but also in terms of the character-
istics of the medium, including how it makes all its content more easily available to
people of different ages and levels of literacy than similar content in books or
newspapers.
Just as variations in climates and soils foster the development of different sizes of
communities, so do the characteristics of different forms of communication facilitate
different scales of political and social organization in terms of how many people over
how large a territory can be included easily in the same communication system. Just
as the hacking of a new path through a mountain range or the building of a canal
through an isthmus typically encourages a significant shift away from the longer
routes between two locations, so do inventions like the telegraph, telephone, and
e-mail encourage people to decrease and alter their use of travel or letters as a means
of personal and business communication. Medium theory also suggests that the
widespread use of a medium may stimulate different modes of thought. Print liter-
acy, for example, may encourage abstract, linear thinking, whereas television viewing
may encourage concrete, nonlinear thinking.
Socrates was perhaps the earliest medium theorist. As conveyed by Plato in his
Phaedrus, Socrates described how writing was different from oral interaction in that
one could neither ask a text a question nor use it to aim specific communications
only to those the communications concerned. Writing, Socrates correctly observed,
would reduce the primacy of human memory. Although Socrates was perceptive in
observing how writing differed from the dialogues he excelled at and favored, he had
greater difficulty seeing how writing could lead to forms of communication that
could not exist in oral communication. What Socrates envisioned as unengaging
monologues written by forgetful writers and directed at ill-defined and forgetful
audiences also led to what we now call science and philosophy—systems of thought
too complex and lengthy even for their creators to memorize, let alone share widely
with preliterate publics.
The first large-scale contribution to medium theory in modern times came from
Innis, whose political–economic study of the ways in which rivers and canals affected
the flow of the fur trade and staples in Canada evolved in the 1940s into his explo-
ration of the flow of information through different media. Innis adapted the
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principles of economic monopolies to the study of information monopolies and the
ways in which different forms of media led to more or less egalitarian systems of
communication. He also outlined the ‘‘biases’’ of various media toward lasting a long
time versus traveling easily over great distances. Innis’ (1950, 1951) tightly packed
Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication describe the history of
human civilization—from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt through the rise of the
Nazis—as the story of changes in communication media.
In grappling with Innis’ overall thesis, McLuhan (1962) transformed his passion
for literature into a critical analysis of the ways that the ‘‘Gutenberg galaxy’’ of print
transformed oral modes of consciousness (based on simultaneous multisensory
experiences) into a world of one-thing-at-a-time lineality, ‘‘rationality,’’ and
cause-and-effect thinking. McLuhan (1964) then pushed his thesis to explore the
ways in which print-based ways of thinking and organizing culture were being sub-
dued by electronic media, which he argued were ‘‘retribalizing’’ humans and creating
the possibilities for village-like involvements on a global scale.
Additional work on the consequences of the shift from orality to literacy has been
conducted by a number of scholars, including Goody and Watt (1963), Havelock
(1976), Ong (1982), and Logan (1986). The significance of the shift from script to
print has been explored in the greatest detail by Eisenstein (1979), who provides
extensive documentation and analysis in support of many medium-theory claims,
including Innis’ arguments about how the Bible in restricted-access manuscript form
served to support the medieval Church’s monopoly over the word of God and access
to salvation, whereas the Bible in widely available print form became a tool of Martin
Luther’s 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
Innis’ and McLuhan’s explorations of the shift from print culture to electronic
culture have been further studied in terms of ‘‘secondary orality’’ (Ong, 1982), role-
system medium theory (Meyrowitz, 1985), the rise of the ‘‘network society’’ (Castells,
1996), changing patterns of social cohesion fostered by mobile phones (Ling, 2008),
and many other frameworks.
Medium theorists also look at the ways in which media interact with each other
and with the social context. Television, when adopted in a print-saturated culture,
for example, would be seen as having a different type of influence than television
added to a primarily oral culture. Another medium-theory argument is that similar
cultural content has different influences when placed in different media and that
changes in media encourage new forms of content and interaction.
As with the media-power narrative, threads of the media-patterns story run
the gamut from deterministic to open ended. In most medium theory, communi-
cation forms are seen as influencing human activities in a probabilistic rather than
an absolutist manner (in the same way that studies of the influence of waterways on
human settlement, travel, and trade are not meant to be taken as simplistic
and monolithic ‘‘waterway determinism’’ in which human agency plays no part).
Carpenter (2001), who edited the journal Explorations with McLuhan in the 1950s,
described their approach as studying the ways in which ‘‘each medium is a unique
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soil. That soil doesn’t guarantee which plants will grow there, but it influences which
plants blossom or wilt there’’ (p. 239). Levinson (1997) prefers the notion of a ‘‘soft
determinism’’ that ‘‘entails an interplay between the information technology making
something possible’’ and human ‘‘decision and planning’’ shaping the use andimpact of
the technology (p. 4). Similarly, Deibert’s (1997) ‘‘ecological holism’’ form of medium
theory explicitly shifts the focus awayfrom the ‘‘inherent effects’’ of each medium to the
ways in which preexisting social forces and trends are either favored or not favored by
the new communication environment. He analyzes the unintended consequences of
technological change in terms of the ‘‘chance fitness’’ between medium and message
that brings ideas and movements from the margins of society to the center.
Dismissing alternative narratives
The narratives of power, pleasure, and patterns offer three simple ‘‘stories’’ about
human existence. Each story feeds into a perspective about what media do to us or
for us. Each of these simple narratives conveys basic truths: Domination and sub-
jugation are aspects of human experience; humans do consciously and actively seek
to meet basic needs and pursue pleasures, both within and apart from power strug-
gles; the structures of natural and human-created environments, both physical and
symbolic, foster some types of human activity while constraining other types of
activity. Yet, if all three narratives capture true elements, then it follows that each
is also incomplete and in some way ‘‘in need’’ of the others to tell a fuller story of
human experience, including our interactions with media.
Indeed, if one stands apart from the defended research turfs that have grown
from the distinct narratives, multiple intersections become apparent. As critical/
cultural studies researchers have embraced and explored the notion of active audi-
ences engaged in creating oppositional and negotiated ‘‘readings’’ of dominant texts,
they have moved away, through ‘‘reception studies,’’ from the no-escape ‘‘culture
industry’’ model of the Frankfurt School and closer to the view of the active audience
of the uses and gratifications perspective (albeit with elements that are foreign to
most uses and gratifications research, such as an explicit, progressive political agenda
and a concern for larger social forces that may foster illusions about the extent to
which perceived needs and desires are dimensions of individual psychology). Indeed,
many cultural studies scholars, while continuing to see the media as designed to
maintain and extend dominant capitalist power, valorize the pleasures derived from
media artifacts as forms of resistance to that power. When uses and gratifications
researchers discover that some of the gratifications sought by audiences are not met,
they provide data that may support the power perspective regarding what is withheld
(often purposely) from the public. Similarly, when uses and gratifications researchers
look at why people may prefer to use one medium rather than another (e.g., Internet
news vs. newspaper news) based on its ‘‘attributes’’ (Katz et al., 1973), they are
stepping into the terrain of medium theory. Conversely, when medium theory
examines how changes in media often undermine hierarchies based on earlier
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patterns of control over information flow and how new forms of media encourage
new desires and new patterns of media use, they are crossing into the territories of
both critical/cultural studies and uses and gratifications. Moreover, medium theory’s
contention that the physical characteristics of the modes of producing communica-
tions have a major influence on the structure of social interaction closely echoes the
Marxist contention about the pervasive influence of the material base inherent in the
modes of production (Flayhan, 1997). Finally, cultural studies scholars have headed
toward medium-theory concerns through recent work that looks beyond studying
specific texts and their reception to the power dimensions of broader processes, such
as globalization, digitalization, interactivity, and ‘‘mediation’’ in general (Silverstone,
2005), which entail complex interactions of the social and the technological.
Such interconnections could easily be explored more routinely and in much
more depth, should media scholars be inclined to do so. Yet, the recent overlaps
in some topics and methods that could be perceived as steps toward mutually
enriching cooperation often have the feel instead of nighttime raids on a competing
camp to snatch a valuable resource (an insight, a finding, or a practice) and take it
back to strengthen the original mission of the base camp. Ritualized assault on the
other positions persists. The task is not very challenging. Because each of the three
narratives of media is clearly missing essential elements described in the others,
the ‘‘fatal flaws’’ in each are easily available to the adherents of the other stories.
The differences among the three narratives lay the groundwork for predictable and
formulaic ‘‘mutually assured dismissal.’’
From the perspective of critical/cultural studies, the other two approaches are
dangerously naı
¨ve about power and serve as apologists for, or agents of, the system
that shapes the development and use of technologies, constrains individual choices,
and shapes perceptions of ‘‘needs’’ and ‘‘meanings.’’ From the perspective of uses and
gratifications, the other two approaches are too ‘‘deterministic’’ (regarding either
forces of domination or technology) and insufficiently appreciative of the clout of
a rational and active public. From the perspective of medium theory, the other two
perspectives are too focused on message content while being insufficiently attentive
to the unique characteristics of each media environment and to the range of tech-
nological affordances and constraints within which both power struggles and user
choices operate.
In short, each of the perspectives tends to critique, marginalize, or dismiss the
other two for not doing what it does. The focus on describing (often accurately) the
flaws of the others distracts each camp from confronting its own shortcomings.
Another logical strategy, however, could be to accept the mutual incompleteness
and limitations of each of the three narratives, as they tend to operate in isolation
from each other, and to explore what insights the other root stories can provide that
one’s own story does not. This ‘‘mutual forgiveness,’’ in place of mutual dismissal,
could also involve looking past what are oft-critiqued defects in particular executions
of research in each camp to what can be learned from each camp’s root narrative.
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Diversifying the media analysis toolkit
My intent is not to argue for a fusion of these three narratives and research camps but
rather for an embrace of their utilitarian multiplicity. The analogy I have in mind is
a basic toolkit that may contain a hammer, a screwdriver, and a wrench. To say that
each of the three tools is a handy item is not to claim that each is useful in every
circumstance. A hammer works better than a screwdriver on a nail. Moreover, I am
not arguing for the development of a combination ‘‘hamdriverench,’’ which would
be an unwieldy device and difficult to use to accomplish much of anything. Instead,
I argue that the complexity of media use and influence demands more than one way
of thinking about what media do to us and what we do with them. Sometimes it
helps to tap a screw with a hammer to get it started into a piece of wood before
finishing the job with a screwdriver. Sometimes a screw has both a shallow slot for
a screwdriver and a sturdier hexagonal head that can be more effectively turned with
a wrench after the screw is partially in place. Analogously, there are some interactions
with media that call out mostly for one of the three narrative tools outlined in this
article, and there are other interactions with media that lend themselves to multiple
epistemological analyses. I suggest this pluralistic toolkit approach as an alternative
to the present situation, where those who like to grasp but one tool tend to see that its
application is needed everywhere to the exclusion of other tools.
As described in the next section, each of the three media narratives can out-
perform the other two when applied to examples that draw on its unique explanatory
strength. These examples suggest that members of each camp should sometimes yield
to the approach offered by one of the other camps. Many media topics, however, are
best addressed by drawing on all three narratives, as illustrated in the section that
follows the next one.
The explanatory power of each narrative
Deconstructing war propaganda
On topics related to the strategic inclusion and exclusion of media content, the power
perspective (particularly its political economy subnarrative) offers special insights not
easily attained through the other two narratives. War propaganda provides a proto-
typical case study. The tendency of the U.S. news media to rely on ‘‘official sources’’—
combined with an orchestrated strategic plan on the part of the powerful—typically
leads to saturation coverage of false stories to the near exclusion of information that
would correct and contextualize the propaganda (Meyrowitz, 2006). Ultimately, the
public cannot know what it does not know or will not embrace consciously, which
means that the uses and gratifications model, relying as it does on self-report, is very
weak in addressing war propaganda. Similarly, the pervasiveness of the same pro-
pagandistic themes in multiple arenas (live speeches, posters, newspapers, radio,
television, the Internet, etc.) subverts the explanatory power of the patterns narrative
and its focus on the differences among media.
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Acknowledging the pleasures of media uses
The purposes and pleasure perspective is most applicable to situations with a very
wide range of meaningful options for media production or use, where the temptations
to be seduced by the power of dominant encodings (or to develop oppositional
decodings) are not at the core of the media experience. A man and woman may
choose to go to a movie on a first date in order to have a shared experience for
conversation (as well as being ‘‘forced’’ into physical closeness in the dark without
the pressure to converse). In the absence of extended family members at home,
television may serve a family as a substitute parent, aunt, or babysitter for children.
People may listen to recorded music for a variety of reasons, including: an aesthetic
experience, relieving boredom, learning how to perform a song, becoming familiar
with the music that is enjoyed by a love interest or peer group, entertaining a guest
without feeling the need for constant conversation, exercising or dancing, experi-
encing the simulated presence of a favorite performing artist, minimizing the
tediousness of housework, helping a child (or oneself) fall asleep, setting a mood
for a party, fostering privacy for lovemaking or an argument, covering the noise of
traffic, obscuring the sound of the less appealing music being played by neighbors
or housemates, and so on. Such a range of personal choices cannot be reduced to
a medium-theory focus on the facilitating or discouraging nature of each medium.
Similarly, to dismiss all such satisfying choices for using media by suggesting that
they are merely irrelevant variations in practices by those distracted from their sub-
jugation would be roughly equivalent to dismissing all Gemeinschaft folk customs
because they were produced by those subjugated in a semifeudal order. Life and its
pleasures do not stop in wait of the revolution.
Explaining structural shifts in communication patterns
The structures and patterns approach offers the most insights when one is looking at
macrolevel changes in communication that cannot be explained only by examining
dominant content and the initial purposes for which content is employed. If one applied
only the power perspective to the early control of Western printing by the Church
and Crown, for example, one might predict that the long-term impact of such
controlled printing would be the increasing religiosity of society and the strength-
ening of monarchal authority (modulated perhaps by ‘‘negotiations’’ with and ‘‘resis-
tance’’ to these dominant powers by readers of such texts). The pleasure narrative
might focus on the how and why of readers’ uses of religious and other available
writings among other communication options. Medium theory, in contrast, would
look at the ways in which printing technology differed from oral communication and
manuscripts, such as allowing for more democratic distribution of writing; for
innovative ways of organizing, standardizing, and citing texts (e.g., page numbers,
tables of contents, and indexes); and for incremental improvements and corrections
that are essential to scientific and scholarly advances. The structures and patterns
narrative, therefore, seems best at explaining how the new medium of print and
spreading literacy ultimately undermined the powerful forces that initially controlled
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the content of the medium. In the long run, printing encouraged the scientific
revolution that secularized modern society and led to the development of constitu-
tional systems that undermined monarchal authority (Eisenstein, 1979). Similarly,
medium theory offers unique insights into the social movements of the 1960s and
1970s. Role-system medium theory would argue that the civil rights and feminist
movements were fueled by the changing patterns of relative access to social information
through television’s erosion of the link between physical location and experience,
rather than simply by ‘‘resistance’’ to the racist and sexist content of television, which
was not that much different from the content of earlier media (Meyrowitz, 1985).
Indeed, given the difference between the narrative of media power and the narrative of
media patterns, it is no surprise that many in critical/cultural studies were caught off
guard by the way that feminism ‘‘broke in,’’ as Hall (1992) puts it, ‘‘as a thief in the
night.interrupted, made an unseemly noise .crapped on the table of cultural studies’’
(p. 282).
Multidimensional analyses
Although there are some situations where one of the three root narratives of media
influence seems to trump the others—at least as an initial tool of analysis—most com-
plex interactions with media would benefit from drawing on all three narratives. Two
such examples are celebrity culture and the explosion of independent, or nonmass,
media.
Three perspectives on celebrity culture
The focus on celebrities in the media clearly serves the interests of power and capi-
tal through such emphasized themes as individualism (‘‘anyone can make it’’) and
money and consumption as a source of success. Most significantly, celebrity coverage
distracts the public’s attention from more crucial events and trends, including sys-
temic problems and inequalities. Nevertheless, members of the public draw many
significant pleasures from their ‘‘relationships’’ with celebrities, including simulated
companionship, emotional release, motivation, inspiration, encouragement to
engage in issues promoted by celebrities, anticipatory socialization, identity forma-
tion through comparison with others, establishing common ground with real-life
friends, negotiating a subcultural identity, and so on. Most people feel enriched by
their ‘‘associations’’ with their favorite media figures. Finally, the evolution in media
(from writing and drawings to photographs, film, radio, TV, handheld video, and so
on) has encouraged an increasingly intimate view of public figures. The current sense
that we personally ‘‘know’’ hundreds of people who are de facto strangers to us was
something that was almost impossible with earlier, more abstract media. In short,
a full understanding of celebrity culture requires at least the three narratives of media
power, media pleasure, and media patterns (Meyrowitz, 2008).
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Three perspectives on independent, nonmass media
New forms of independent, citizen-produced media have developed in recent years
in reaction to the domination of the major media and their alignment with powerful
multinational corporate agendas, including neoliberal policies. The use of such
independent media to expose what the corporate media hide or distort, therefore,
clearly fits into the power narrative of resistance to dominant forces. At the same
time, such overtly ‘‘political’’ uses of new media blend structurally with the ways in
which people use e-mail, blogs, social networking sites, YouTube videos, and citizen-
to-citizen online sales and trades (through e-Bay, craigslist, freecycle, etc.) to create
their own relatively egalitarian communities of interaction. The collaborative ‘‘bee-
hive’’ efforts of such online phenomena as Wikipedia, as well as the thousands of
online forums where people exchange news, opinions, and advice on seemingly
everything—from personal, technical, and medical situations to consumer products
and celebrities—give strong support for the notion of active, rational uses of media
to meet personal and social needs largely independent of communications used for
domination and subjugation. The online world certainly has its share of fraud and
distortions (and data mining that enhances corporate and government power), yet it
is also filled with a remarkable amount of individual and collective sociability,
pooling of knowledge, and generosity of spirit. Finally, all the new forms of inde-
pendent media are prime examples of the patterns narrative that highlights the
facilitating potential of new media environments to make possible these forms of
previously impossible content and patterns of interaction. Light, inexpensive digital
cameras, audio recorders, and camcorders, in combination with copy, forward, and
cut-and-paste options and the noncentralized power of the World Wide Web, have
afforded the development of alternative sources of news, entertainment, and per-
sonal communication that are inexpensive to produce and virtually free to access and
distribute widely once the technology is in place. Thus, a combination toolkit of
narratives—power, pleasure, and patterns—enhances our understanding of a com-
plex matrix of use of, and interactions with, new media.
Conclusion: Toward pluralistic analyses of media
This article has outlined three narratives that underlie competing camps of media
research and theory: the power and resistance narrative, the purposes and pleasures
narrative, and the structure and patterns narrative. Each narrative offers a different
answer to the question: ‘‘What do media do to us or for us?’’ Each media narrative
grows from a broader ‘‘story’’ about human existence in which media play a predict-
able part. When exposed to the elements, the root narratives underlying each
research approach reveal essential truths while also calling out for some reinforce-
ment from each other. Yet, most adherents of each narrative tend to ignore the
adherents of the other narratives, except to attack or dismiss them. In contrast to
this mutual dismissal, I have argued here that understandings of media would be
enriched if those who work within each of these three subdomains—as well as those
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not covered by this three-part framework—would engage each other in more
respectful discussion and debate with the goal of gaining more textured and nuanced
understandings of media through multiple root narratives. Ultimately, employing
a more complete toolkit for media analysis would enhance the credibility and the
goals of all research camps. Undesirable traits that have resulted from inbreeding
within isolated camps—such as blind spots, methodological provincialism, obscure
vocabularies, and exaggerated claims—could be minimized. The same argument
for drawing on multiple epistemologies and methodologies could and should be
applied to other nonmedia content areas within the broad domain of human
communication.
Acknowledgments
I thank Robin E. Sheriff for her many insights, encouragement, and extensive feed-
back. I am grateful as well to Patricia Aufderheide, Rene
´e Carpenter, Jonathan
Cohen, Nick Couldry, Max Dawson, John Nguyet Erni, Thomas Gencarelli, Jerry
Harp, Paul Heyer, Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Jefferson Pooley, Peter Schmidt,
Michael Soha, Lance Strate, and Bibi van den Berg for their comments on various
oral and written versions of the ideas presented here—even though I did not have the
time, space, or wisdom to incorporate all their suggestions in this brief article.
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